Martin Meenagh blog

  American economic growth is widely viewed as having been marked, across the history of the republic, by a remarkable period of growth between 1870 and 1970 which has been characterised as a ‘special century.’ Robert J. Gordon, writing in the remarkable and deeply important The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2015) for instance, has noted how a revolution in continental affairs was made possible across the hundred years by a set of ‘special inventions.’ The principals of these inventions, which Gordon identified as the railway, and the contingent industrial processes such as steelmaking it inspired and sustained, the telegraph, and electricity, made possible a national market, dense urban areas, and the exploitation of American agricultural and mineral resources on a vast scale. Gordon, of course, proceeds in his argument by redefining and adding to GDP, arguing (alongside many others) that it is a flawed metric. Instead, he employs an enhanced figure of GDP adjusted for pu...

  Andrew Jackson was one of the most consequential of American presidents, but also had a great impact on the republic before his presidency. The Battle of New Orleans, which he commanded, for instance, was a rare British defeat following the events of the War of 1812 and, though won after the peace was signed at a distance, allowed white Americans to attempt to salvage some dignity from the humiliation. Jackson’s campaign in the ‘Creek War’ associated with the larger 1812 conflict was also part of a move into West Florida which was very much a Jacksonian initiative and unimaginable without him. It strengthened forces in Georgia and the wider southeast in the confrontation with Tecumseh and Tenkswatawa’s confederacy which later produced a momentum for Indian removal and nullification in the region. This drive also allowed for President Monroe and John Quincy Adams to negotiate with Spain in 1820 for the West Florida territory, producing an agreement which created a boundary for...

  The United States was essentially produced and maintained in its security during a period of intense Anglo-French competition. In the hundred years after 1702, the United Kingdom and France were at war for some fifty-two years. For most of the same period, the forces and Companies of the Dutch Republic were also amongst dominant sea-powers and international lenders. France and Britain maintained extensive insular and continental bases and colonies in North America, along with Spain. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, both faced competition and revolt in the Caribbean and Sargasso seas, not least during the rise of the Republic of Haiti, which successfully resisted massive French assaults between 1795 and 1804. During this competition, inspired financially and then with critical naval and military support by the Kingdom of France, the United States succeeded in their expensive rebellion against London. The USA nevertheless maintained a position of neutrality in the F...

    The Constitution of the United States is a document with seven articles and twenty-seven amendments at the time of writing in 2020. It does not represent a codified body of law, but nor is it the changeable Act of a sovereign parliament, as British constitutional documents are. Instead, the Constitution creates a flexible system of checks and balances which lay out the ‘ground rules’ for the institution, allocation and limitation of government power at the federal level. In itself, it makes any sort of positive governance difficult to begin beyond the core functions of foreign policy and defence, but once capacities and elaborations have been added, they have proven very difficult to reform. It is certainly the case that the original document, ratified in 1788 was both a response to the perceived weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation which preceded it, and a document which was less idealistic and more informed by Hobbesian and tough-minded ideas of power and capa...

    The Spanish American War, conducted across a little under four months in the Summer of 1898, has often been seen as the inauguration of he twentieth-century power of the United States. In this telling, the American media and administration, armed with a growing Navy, overwhelmed a decaying European power and established dominance in the Caribbean, associated itself with democratic movements in Cuba, and colonised the Philippines as the consequence of a form of republican Imperialism. This energised the American economy after the panic of 1893, and helped heal the wounds of the Civil War amongst white Americans. As so often with historical events, the commonly understood narrative is in itself a product of some of the contingent needs of tellers. The War could in fact be contextualised as the culmination of Gilded Age trends which speak as much to the past as the future. For example, both Secretary of State Blaine and President Harrison, in office between 1889 and 1893, wer...