AHC/WI: Delay or prevent industrialization in the United States

Even delaying industrialization would have a big effect though. If the US was industrialized at 1850 levels in 1880, they would still be "industrialized" but they would be significantly behind.

The US early industrialization was boosted significantly by high tariffs. From 1792 to 1860, the percentage of the federal budget attained from tariffs hovered at 80-95%, and did not drop below 30% until 1916. This isn't the actual tariff rate, but the amount of the federal revenue coming from tariffs.

The actual tariff rates themselves were on average, 20-50% of the total value of imports until 1910. High tariffs in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed "infant industries" to develop in the United States without competing with the prices of British industrial goods which were much cheaper at the time.

If tariffs on manufactured goods were much lower especially in the north and it was cheaper to import British manufactured goods, it really could have delayed US industrialization; by how much, I'm not sure, but it would certainly have a significant effect.

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A lower tariff isn't likely to make a dramatic difference. There's no clear relationship between periods of lower rates and speed of industrial development in the US. The infant industries argument might just be wrong.
 
This is a difficult challenge because, as several posters have pointed out, the US of A had a lot of natural advantages which meant that early industrialisation was highly likely.

It's not impossible, however. What it needs is the strengthening of certain traits which were already present in the American body politic, and thus interfere with the sort of labour needed to foster early industrialisation.

In OTL, American industrialisation needed cheap labour to grow, but it ran into a big problem. Native-born white American males hated the idea of working for someone else, ie for wages. They thought it was demeaning, degrading and insecure. They might take such employment in dire straits, but they would jump out of it at short notice if they found any alternative.

Employers of native-born white American males noted that their labour was horrible, being prone to showing up to work late, drunk or not at all, quitting at short or no notice, and going on strike for higher wages.

For the simple fact was that native-born white Americans did have alternatives to working for others. They could strike out west and farm for themselves, becoming independent that way. Or if they stayed in the cities, they could become self-employed artisans or professionals. Good for their pride, but bad for early industrialisation.

Early industrialists got around this problem by using other forms of cheap labour which did not have the same view of wage labour. In the North it was white urban women and later immigrants, while in the South it was mostly slaves.

Cut off that supply of cheap labour, and American industrialisation is stunted from the beginning. It will still be there, but nothing like as fast growing as it was in OTL.

The trick is to have a more vigorous promotion of the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, the "yeoman farmer", combined with a stronger version of the nativist tendencies which were present in OTL. Let "America for Americans" be the slogan from early on. Immigration restrictions are there from the beginning.

This produces an America where there is a much greater tendency to strike out west, where they can be yeoman farmers and where more of the women are living in rural areas and not available for labour in urban factories. The lack of immigration also means that there's an even greater amount of empty land pulling people west, combined with limited immigrants in cities to be turned into factory labour.

This, in turn, means that industrialisation in the US of A proceeds much more slowly.
 
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What would have delayed or prevented industrialization in the US for most of the 19th century? Slowing industrial growth to that of the Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, or lower.

Slowing industrial growth to that of the Russians, the Ottomans, or even Italy is pretty much impossible since the US isn't a feudal society unless you somehow find a way to turn the US into a feudal society, but one thing that may delay industrialization somewhat is keeping the Embargo Act of 1807 from happening. The scarcity of European goods essentially forced the US to industrialize despite Jefferson's farmer ideal.

Another thing may be instability. One reason France failed to industrialize despite large coal deposits in Lille and Alsace-Lorraine (to the point that Bismarck annexed Alsace-Lorraine essentially because of its rich coal and iron deposits) is because it was fairly unstable, what with the numerous unstable French regimes that existed and finally ended with the rise of the stable Third Republic. Making America more unstable (perhaps by avoiding Jacksonian democracy) could very well reduce industrialization.
 

Deleted member 97083

A lower tariff isn't likely to make a dramatic difference. There's no clear relationship between periods of lower rates and speed of industrial development in the US. The infant industries argument might just be wrong.
Yes, the infant industry argument has been debated over the years and politicized. I am not talking about the modern day, or even the latter part of the 20th century, only about the early United States in which we have some pretty strong evidence that those policies worked in a historical sense. Many historians publishing papers up to this day, continue to establish a causal relationship between the infant industry protections suggested in the time of Alexander Hamilton, and U.S. industrial growth during the period it first became a world power.

In OTL, American industrialisation needed cheap labour to grow, but it ran into a big problem. Native-born white American males hated the idea of working for someone else, ie for wages. They thought it was demeaning, degrading and insecure. They might take such employment in dire straits, but they would jump out of it at short notice if they found any alternative.

Employers of native-born white American males noted that their labour was horrible, being prone to showing up to work late, drunk or not at all, quitting at short or no notice, and going on strike for higher wages.

For the simple fact was that native-born white Americans did have alternatives to working for others. They could strike out west and farm for themselves, becoming independent that way. Or if they stayed in the cities, they could become self-employed artisans or professionals. Good for their pride, but bad for early industrialisation.
This sounds as flawed as "Protestant work ethic" but in the other direction. Any actual historical sources for this?
 
My textbook I recall does mention poor whites preferred the rural "yeomen" lifestyle to factory work. However, for many of them the fertile land was not there, or simply too far away.
 
POD after the 1776? Well by that point the Thirteen Colonies had a massive (and reasonably urbanized) population, forget looking at mineral maps of the eastern US, the PoD must do something about that. Perhaps the Revolutionary war concludes with Britain keeping some of the Southern colonies and 1812-esque hostilities prevent the US from importing food and mean that a lot of the stockpiled food is being used by soldiers. As a result the climate phenomenon of 1816 causes large scale starvation in northern population centres.

It still won't slow industrialization to Russian Empire levels, but it might put the US on a path more similar to OTL's Canada, especially if the next generation of American farmers looking to get off their parent's land look for land in the west rather than repopulate the cities.
 
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How about we cheat? Bring back the bubonic plague, but make the resurgence more deadly, killing 6/7 Americans, while the British quarantine the continent for a decade and (somehow) keep every rat away from Europe.

Yeah, it's cheating. Any plague in the Americas would realistically transmission its way to Europe.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Lousiana including New Orleans as well as the West Coast go British. The gold from Gold Rush would go to British Empire rather than the US, which means the latter would lose a significant source of capital to fund investments. Meanwhile, losing New Orleans means that US trade via Mississipi would be controller by the Brits. Later, the US would lose a big chunk of oil reserves, which would certainly affect their progress during the late 19th century.

But institutional roll back is needed to slow down US industrialization to Russian level.
 
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Have the Bo weevil show up in the American South a few decades earlier destroying the cotton industry butterflying or at least delaying the American civil war. War contracts fueled the growth of Northern industry.
 
This sounds as flawed as "Protestant work ethic" but in the other direction. Any actual historical sources for this?
I'm surprised you find this controversial; it's hardly disputed that cheaper female and immigrant labour helped to kick-start American industrialisation (and slave labour, for what industrialisation was present in the South). See here and here for a couple of handy online references for how female labour was cheaper than male labour. Robert Starobin in Industrial Slavery in the Old South set out a variety of calculations of how slave labour was cheaper than free labour in slaveholding states. For the role of immigrants being drivers for early urban growth and being willing to work for lower wages than native-born Americans, see Hirschman and Mogford's study of the role of immigrants in American industrialisation, available here (particularly section 2.2 which discusses how immigrants contributed to the size of urban agglomerations by 1850 and in accepting lower wages).

For nineteenth-century native Americans' view of working for wages as degrading and denying workers the products of their labour, see for example the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-class History, Volume 1 by Eric Arnesen at p810, available on google books here. Or in A Companion to 19th-Century America, edited by William Barney at p168 onward, available on google books here. Or Glickman in chapter 5 of Class: The Anthology by Michael J. Roberts, available on google books here.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
Hamilton die early, no First Bank of United States, federal government believe regulation of banking is outside it purview, frequent economic crash and boom, with gold and silver only trusted currency, and credit become non-available ?
large number of American flee West of Appalachia, land ownership (farming land) become standard for voting and jury duty, very weak government become preferences of citizen, with contract and commercial law fall under non-enforcement ?
 
Yes, the infant industry argument has been debated over the years and politicized. I am not talking about the modern day, or even the latter part of the 20th century, only about the early United States in which we have some pretty strong evidence that those policies worked in a historical sense. Many historians publishing papers up to this day, continue to establish a causal relationship between the infant industry protections suggested in the time of Alexander Hamilton, and U.S. industrial growth during the period it first became a world power.

That's because many historians don't have much of a grounding in economics and either elaborate on what was written before them or make arguments that rest of historical analysis of policy instead of economic analysis ('this was the intended purpose, this eventually happened, so the achieved purpose vindicates the policy'). There is no clear correlation between the level of the tariff and the rate of growth in the 19th century US economy.

Hamilton die early, no First Bank of United States, federal government believe regulation of banking is outside it purview, frequent economic crash and boom, with gold and silver only trusted currency, and credit become non-available ?

Most of the 19th century happened in the US with no Bank of the United States and the major Federal interventions during that period were simply adopting the worst regulatory practices of the state banking systems. And yet it grew.

Jared is actually on to something here. Tariff or no tariff and Bank or no Bank isn't likely to make a major difference. You can change the color shading of the painting but you're not going to change the content. You need to kill the waves of migration and find some way to kill what progress has already been made. That's not that easy.
 
I'm thinking only a partially successful ARW, in which Britain manages to suppress the rebellion in New England but fail to push all the way down the coast, which would lead the 'rump' US to be centered more around the more agrarian/plantation-heavy south, for which their economy runs primarily from crop farming Tobacco, Cotton and Tea, which is poorly industrialized
 
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