The United States as a Developing Nation: The Myth of the Weak American State vis-à-vis Capital

Noam Maggor, University of London

Was the United States in the nineteenth century a developing nation? If yes, how did it emerge from its origins as a rapidly-expanding exporter of agricultural goods – cotton and then wheat – to become an industrial giant in its own right? My presentation engages with these questions using a comparative perspective, arguing that the transformation of the U.S. economy in this period must be attributed to an American developmental state. The American state in the nineteenth century, long viewed as absent, feeble, or easily coopted, was in fact highly interventionist in its orientation, analogous in key ways to developmental states elsewhere around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Most notably, the state was not only “market enhancing” – creating comfortable and safe conditions for market actors – but also “market shaping” (Yeling Tan 2021), that is proactive in disciplining private capital and promoting politically-driven developmental imperatives.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 208. Rethinking the Developmental State 5: Roundtable