The American Road to Capitalism
Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development
and Political Conflict, 1620–1877
By
Charles Post
With a Foreword
by
Ellen Meiksins Wood
Historical Materialism 28
Brill 2011

Charles Post
The American Road to Capitalism
https://faculty.bmcc.cuny.edu:7002/faculty/upload/American%20Road%20to%20Capitalism,%201982.pdf
Essay 1982
This essay is an attempt to examine the theoretical and historiographic debates
on the development of capitalism in the United States between 1790 and 1877.
The realization of the necessary conditions for capitalist production in the
United States took place through the articulation, expanded reproduction and
transformation of three forms of production, and through a process of political
class struggle that culminated in the Civil War. Each of these forms of
production—slavery, petty-commodity production and capitalist manufacture
—has been the subject of theoretical and historiographic controversy. These
debates will be reviewed in order to determine the place of each productive
form in the development of us capitalism. The Civil War’s place in the history
of us capitalist development has also been the subject of well-known
controversy; these discussions will be scrutinized to determine how the class
struggle that culminated in the War affected capitalist development in the

United States.