Les fondements historiques de la domination économique américaine

Résumé En

The Historical Bases of American Economiec Leadership. G. Wright. The economic pre-eminence of the USA is one of the dominant facts of twentieth century world history, often taken as so self-evident and inevitable as to require no explanation. This paper argues to the contrary, that American economic leadership was far from inevitable, and indeed poses a challenge to historical understanding. Geographic size and natural resources were not in themselves advantageous, but they became so through the rise of an indigenous national technological community or network, engaged in adapting European technologies to the American environment. This proposition is illustrated with accounts of the so-called "American system of manufactures", and of minerals as a knowledge industry. These two sectors laid the institutional foundations for the science-based industries ofthe twentieth century. American economic performance demonstrates the power of increasing returns to scale, as depicted in the models from the "new" or endogenous growth theory. But the effective economic scale of the US national economy was itself the cultural and institutional product of Amercian history.