| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carville Earle. The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2003. Pp. xviii, 449. $69.95.
In this bold overview, Carville Earle discerns a powerful rhythm in American history and historical geography. While accepting Nikolai Kondratieff's long waves of economic change, Earle does not emphasize either the periodic crises in "the world capitalist economy" or the role of war in creating the half-century-long waves. Earle's American way is much more complex, nuanced and, ultimately, political.	1
Earle posits a structure of seven completed American historical cycles, each including both good and bad economic times. There have been two contending approaches to political economy that have dominated in alternate cycles. The first approach, which he rather confusingly calls "republican" in the colonial period and "democratic" thereafter, was dominant in the 1630s-1680s, 1740s-1780s, 1830s-1880s, and 1930s-1970s. This set of strategies, said to originate with James Harrington, was comparatively egalitarian and nationalistic and, in Jacksonian and New Deal versions, tended toward diversified, consumer-oriented, and protectionist economics, with resulting "regional volatility" and the dispersal and segregation of populations in rural and suburban areas. The second set of strategies is associated with Walpolean "salutary neglect," Hamiltonian Federalism, the Gilded Age, and "Reagan's America." John Locke was the supposed inspiration for these liberal-elitist regimes, marked by individualist, producer-oriented "trickle down" economics, growing inequalities in wealth and income, internationalist foreign policies, and faster concentration of populations. Locke was not an Adam Smith, however, and as a member of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations he supported rigid control of the Irish economy, the mercantilist-protectionist Navigation Acts, and the vice-admiralty courts to enforce them.	. . .

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