By Louis Hyman

The Early Republic (1776-1820)

1776: Independence

The Declaration of Independence was as much economic as political, resisting the mercantilist system favored by the British. That same year, Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations," providing theoretical underpinning for the American experiment in free markets.

1787: Commodifying Land

The Northwest Ordinance established a framework for converting indigenous land into settled territory, setting the stage for American land markets and Westward expansion.

1803: Continental Expansion

France ceded its "territory" to the U.S. (though the indigenous peoples there didn't consent). The Louisiana Purchase enabled Americans to imagine continental ambitions as a reality.

1791-93: The Factory and the Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin brought the expansion of slavery in the U.S. South. That year, the first industrial mill, Slater Mill, opened in Rhode Island to process that cotton into fabric. These developments set the course of the intertwined antebellum economy in the North and South -- an enslaved workforce in the South and an industrialized workforce in the North.

1799: Napoleonic America

Excluded from the British mercantilist system, the new nation struggled until Napoleon's rise created opportunities for Americans as neutral suppliers to both France and Britain. Huge shipping fortunes emerged, creating demand for banks, investment opportunities and insurers. Huge shipping fortunes emerged, creating demand for banks and insurers. These fortunes underpinned the first large-scale mechanized textile production, completely replacing household production for the first time in U.S. history.

1817-19: The Free Market

The Corporation was initially a state-chartered monopoly for the public good, but in the early 19th century that began to change. The NYSE created the first open securities markets in the U.S. The Supreme Court's Dartmouth v. Woodward decision established clear limits on state power to intrude on private corporations, strengthening corporate rights and autonomy. Nearly all states, however, still retained the right on whether to charter corporations, which needed to have a public purpose. Only slowly over the 19th century, beginning with New York in 1811, did states make creating a corporation a matter of paperwork rather than legislation.

1820: New England Mills

The textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell, Mass., were a distinctly American approach to industrialization. These mill towns employed young women from rural New England, providing dormitory housing and attempting to maintain moral oversight while maximizing efficiency.

1816: A National Vision

Henry Clay pushed the Whig Party's nationalized economic vision through Congress. High tariffs would protect nascent industrialization and increase federal revenue. The Second Bank of the U.S. would stabilize currency and backstop riskier state banks. Internal improvements, like roads and turnpikes, received investment to control the vast territory beyond the coasts. While seemingly anodyne, all three would spark political controversy for decades.

The Market Revolution (1820-60)

1825: Canals and Connections

The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, transforming upstate New York and the Midwest into international wheat exporters, especially to Caribbean slave plantations dependent on food imports.

1830: Westward Ho

The Baltimore & Ohio, the first long-distance East-West railroad company, allowed goods from the West to flow East like never before, launching a half-century of innovation, building and speculation. That year, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, seeking to eliminate or relocate Native Americans east of the Mississippi. The combination of rail and rifle consolidated U.S. control in the east.

1837: Financialized Enslavement

The Panic of 1837 revealed the connections between slavery, land speculation and banking. Southern banks had issued currency backed by enslaved people as collateral, creating a volatile financial system that collapsed when cotton prices fell and land speculation schemes failed. These failures would underpin the latter credibility of Confederate finances.

1838: Electronic Communication

Samuel Morse's telegraph enabled instantaneous long-distance communication, beginning the integration of global financial markets and revolutionizing business coordination across vast distances.

1839: Married Women's Property Acts

The MWPA began ending the practice of coverture, allowing married women to own property and conduct business independent of husbands.

1849: California Gold Rush

The California Gold Rush increased global gold supply, establishing San Francisco as a financial center and creating new networks of investment and speculation that connected the West Coast to global markets. The influx of gold underpinned the global currency expansion that facilitated economic growth.

National Consolidation (1860-90)

1863-64: The End of These United States

The Legal Tender Act enabled federal paper money -- greenbacks -- that became the sole official U.S. currency within years. The Homestead Act settled Americans in large numbers in the trans-Mississippi West. The Pacific Railway Act chartered the first transcontinental railway, the Union Pacific. The National Banking Acts created a uniform national bank system. The nation now mattered more than the states. United States was now singular, not plural.

1863: Emancipation Proclamation

Issued during the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation offered freedom for all enslaved people within the Confederacy. The end of slavery wouldn't occur until the war's end.

1869: Transcontinental Railroad

Leland Stanford drove a golden spike to connect the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. While Stanford became wealthy and famous, most work was done by tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants who comprised 90% of the workforce building the Western portion.

1860s: Department Store

New York department stores like A.T. Stewart's Marble Palace and Macy's revolutionized retail by offering fixed prices, return policies and vast selections, essentially bringing a long street of shops under one roof. These stores created new forms of consumer culture and employment opportunities, particularly for women as shopgirls and clerks.

1872: Montgomery Ward

Aaron Montgomery Ward introduced the first mail-order catalog to bring city prices to rural Americans. The proliferating railroad network had reduced distribution costs, and Ward realized there was a large market for delivering dry goods to railroad depots. His first catalog was just one page, but by the 1880s' end, it exceeded 500 pages with 24,000 items.

1873: Andrew Carnegie and Coinage

The Coinage Act placed the U.S. on a de facto gold standard amid the global panic of 1873. Jay Cooke, and other investment houses, collapsed in the panic. In the chaos, Andrew Carnegie began acquiring companies that would form Carnegie Steel, which made the steel for the nation's rail system.

1865-77: The Failure of Reconstruction

The Civil War's aftermath began with hope soon dashed. But full citizenship with political and economic equality was elusive. With federal troop withdrawal as part of the Compromise of 1877 to make Rutherford Hayes president, Reconstruction-era optimism ended.

The Industrial Age (1870-1913)

1870: Business Avoids the Market

Jay Cooke received a Pennsylvania charter for a corporation that would only own other companies -- a holding company that began an era when the biggest businesses actively avoided market forces. The alternative was the trust, which required no corporate charter. John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust, whose major successor is Exxon Mobil, launched the American oil industry. After the Sherman Antitrust Act, purposeful monopoly became formally illegal but remained difficult to enforce.

1877: Strike!

The first national railroad workers' strike in 1877 was the beginning of industrial-era struggles between labor and capital, as Army and National Guard forces suppressed worker rebellions along rail lines.

1883: Segregated Markets

The American racial segregation system known as Jim Crow is often misunderstood as emerging immediately after slavery, but actually began two decades later. In a series of rulings in 1883, the Supreme Court found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, ruling that the federal government lacked power to prevent private business discrimination. After this decision, segregation spread to consumption sites like restaurants, hotels and trains. Only after constraints on Black purchasing did constraints on Black voting appear.

1882-85: A Shrinking World

Railroads in the 1880s and 1890s drove not only economic but cultural transformation. On Sunday, Nov. 18, 1883, railroad workers and much of the population simultaneously adjusted their watches from local time to one of four standardized time zones created by railroads to ease scheduling. AT&T became the foundation of a national telecom network creating near-instantaneous cross-country communication. More ominously, the West Coast white-labor movement pushed for Chinese immigrant labor exclusion from railroads, resulting in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first but not last U.S. immigration-restriction law.

Urbanization (1911-29)

1913: The First Chain Store

In 1913, A&P opened its first "economy" store pushing customers to pay cash in return for lower prices. These chain-store models were imitated, driving down prices everywhere they spread in the 1920s.

1911-13: Stabilizing Capitalism

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor released his book on efficiently optimizing factory workers, setting the stage for 20th-century management theory. More famously, Henry Ford established the assembly line, revolutionizing worker productivity and enabling higher wages through the Five Dollar Day. The Federal Reserve attempted to stabilize the U.S. credit and monetary system. The 16th Amendment simultaneously allowed national income tax. Together, these events marked the beginning of an economy where state and corporation planned for growth and abundance.

1913-24: The Inward Turn

World War I ended a long century of global free trade. In the war's aftermath, rural America entered a slump lasting until after World War II. The 1920 census was the first showing more Americans in towns and cities than countryside. Simultaneously, broad nativist fear of immigrants, and their labor, led to 1921 and 1924 acts creating restrictive quota systems basically eliminating immigration from anywhere but northwest Europe and the New World.

1921: Corporate Innovation for the Industrial Age

Pioneered by Alfred Sloan at General Motors, the multidivisional corporation allowed for the complex bureaucracy necessary to oversee corporate growth in the 20th century.

The New Deal Era (1929-45)

1934: Fair Markets

After the 1929 stock-market crash, the SEC sought to transform free markets into fair markets where insider information would no longer rule. The SEC, and accompanying public-accounting overhauls, made the U.S. stock market the most stable and growing in history, allowing broad, confident corporate investment.

1931-40: New Deal Finance

The Federal Housing Administration created a novel mechanism channeling idle investment capital into a nationwide building spree that became suburbia. This mechanism, along with creative tax incentives, was replicated throughout the New Deal -- jump-starting technical and financial innovation in consumer credit, rural electrification, aluminum mining and aerospace industry.

1933-35: Organized Labor

The National Labor Relations Act became the first enduring foundation for U.S. labor-management relations. Struggles between labor and capital moved from streets to courtrooms, establishing workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively while creating legal frameworks for resolving disputes. Industrial unions, like the CIO, represent entire workforces at major corporations for the first time.

The Postwar Moment (1945-70)

1941-45: Pax Americana

World War II brought the U.S. out of isolation into the world as a superpower. After a Great Depression decade, policymakers wanted continued government spending to avoid another downturn. Abroad, this took the form of massive European rebuilding investment, the Marshall Plan. Domestically, military spending was seen as protection against a Great Depression return. While permanent standing armies existed since World War I, military spending was now central to both industrial strength and economic prosperity.

1947-50: Industrial Peace

The Taft-Hartley Act limited union organizing ability, banning closed shops and secondary strikes, but didn't roll back many of labor's key newfound rights. The so-called Treaty of Detroit, the 1950 GM-UAW contract, represented a new postwar industrial peace combining rising industrial wages with rising corporate profits.

1955: Franchising America

America's most beloved food, the hamburger, popularized a new business model, the franchise, when Ray Kroc founded the McDonald's corporation in 1955. "In business for yourself, but not by yourself," the franchise offered all corporate management advice, branding support and procurement security while still promising small-business independence.

1958: The Conglomerate

During the 1960s, a new corporation form emerged, fueled by management faith and bullish stock markets: the conglomerate. These companies assembled unrelated businesses under single ownership, believing professional management could improve any enterprise. The conglomerate model's 1969 collapse would set the stage for rethinking the corporation during the 1970s.

1960: Key Moment in Civil Rights

In 1960, college students in Greensboro, N.C., refused to leave the segregated Woolworth's lunch counter. This simple demand to spend money spread to other cities, forming a key part of the civil-rights movement's success by targeting economic discrimination directly.

1962: The Big Box

The quintessential big-box store, Wal-Mart leveraged containerization, computers and globalization in ways other retailers attempted to imitate, revolutionizing retail through supply-chain efficiency and scale economies.

1963: Equal Pay Act

The Equal Pay Act was the first step toward eliminating pay inequality between men and women. Actual pay and employment gaps weren't easily eliminated, but the Act established legal machinery for change.

1964: Second Reconstruction

Just as Jim Crow's political project began through consumption and work segregation, so too did it end before political segregation ended in the following year's Civil Rights Act of 1965. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade discrimination in public spaces, like Woolworth counters, while connecting this to hiring freedom from discrimination by establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

1964: New Standards for a New Economy

The shipping container became the railway standard for intermodal transportation, revolutionizing global trade through standardization. International Business Machines' IBM 360 was the first computer that standardized hardware, which allowed software to be used again and again across installations. Together the container and the computer set standards that enabled a new globalized, tech-driven economy.

1965: America Reopens

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as Hart-Celler, abolished the longstanding national origins quota system that had favored northern and western Europeans since the 1920s. In its place, a new system gave priority to family reunification and skilled labor, unintentionally setting the stage for large-scale immigration from Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Neoliberalism (1975-2008)

1975: Software Eats the World

Microsoft's DOS marked software and digital goods emergence more generally. With Microsoft's rise, the industrial material age slowly gave way to the postindustrial digital age, transforming how value was created and distributed.

1970: Shareholder Value and the Lean Corporation

Milton Friedman's 1970 essay "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" provided the intellectual foundation for the shareholder-value revolution that would transform American capitalism. Friedman argued that corporations had no responsibility beyond maximizing profits for shareholders, rejecting the notion that businesses should serve broader social purposes. This philosophy found its most influential practitioner in Jack Welch at General Electric, who popularized the shareholder value movement by focusing corporate strategy on stock price maximization rather than stakeholder balance.

1978: Cheap Flights and Low Taxes

The Airline Deregulation Act ended federal airline price regulation, the beginning of a "deregulation" flurry enabling market-based overhauls across industries. California passed Proposition 13 limiting home tax increases. The proposition inspired nationwide tax revolt movements. Together, these Acts signaled deep shifts in how Americans understood the value, or lack thereof, of government intervention in the economy.

1980s-91: Deindustrialization and Downsizing

The 1970s had brought the closing of many traditional Rust Belt factories. The new industrialization of Silicon Valley, meanwhile, happened with nonunionized labor forces, whose own factories would close by the end of the 1980s. Office workers were next to take the hit in the 1990s. The 1991 recession marked the first time that jobs didn't return after a recession. Roles were automated away, or increasingly, replaced by temps and consultants.

1994-95: North American Free Trade Act and World Trade Organization

Nafta and WTO membership was the culmination of free-trade ideology in the U.S., creating integrated global markets while accelerating manufacturing job losses in traditional industrial regions. These agreements gave priority to corporate mobility over worker protections, reshaping the global economy.

1994-95: E-Commerce:

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 as an online bookstore, while Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1995 as an auction site. These platforms transformed retail by eliminating geographic constraints and proving consumers would trust online transactions.

2006: The Cloud

E-commerce transformed retail, but the Cloud transformed everything. Starting with Amazon Web Services in 2006, clouds enabled businesses to run on standardized software and hardware they didn't need to manage, like factories and farms had shipped on industrial-age railroads. These cloud data centers became some of the economy's largest energy users.

The Decline of Neoliberalism (2008-Present)

2008: Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Tea Party, Occupy

The 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis revealed deregulated capitalism's limits. Though quick thinking stabilized global markets, the crisis exposed neoliberalism's core inequality. On both left (Occupy) and right (the tea-party movement), new politics emerged criticizing free-trade economy gains -- leading, ultimately, to Donald Trump's presidency, whose MAGA politics brought neoliberalism and free trade to an end.

2022: The AI Revolution

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, few could imagine how quickly it would destabilize everything that Americans thought they knew about work and investment. Behind all AI was hardware company Nvidia, founded in 1993, which started making videogame graphics cards. Unexpectedly, the same calculations required for games were needed for AI. The first $4 trillion firm, Nvidia is a pure design company outsourcing manufacturing, illustrating how 21st century hardware is mostly about ideas, not things.

Louis Hyman is an American political-economy historian and professor at Johns Hopkins. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 27, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.