ABSTRACT
At the opening of the nineteenth century the American economy was by every measure an agrarian one; by its close it was an industrial economy (Adams, 1961 [1889]; US Industrial Commission, 1902–3). That does not mean that the agrarian dimension diminished; it most certainly had not done so at any time during the transformation from agrarianism to industrialism. Even today, when the agrarian dimension is a relatively small fraction of the total economy, American agricultural products provide a significant part of the world’s food supply. But the growth in industrialism was so startling following the Civil War that it permanently surpassed the agrarian dimension in relative importance.
