There have been several bursts of American commerce over the past 170 years.
Four factors have caused this: Escape from the elites in the U.S., Innovation, the End of the U.S. Elite and Market size.
As I have pointed for several decades, the elites of the world have repressed innovation. Elites are the prime beneficiaries of the status quo. They have preferred, everywhere, to maintain their elite status by passing on wealth and power in commerce to their eldest sons.
The Great Western opening in the U.S. from 1830 to 1940 allowed the second sibling and other siblings of the East Coast elite to move West. In Europe the vast new British, Dutch and French empires allowed the escape of the elite offspring to success in the far flung colonies. This was most important in India. In the colonies new channels of commerce were opened by entrepreneurial offspring which created vigorous companies and brought new commodities and new markets to Europe. The most important singular example was Hong Kong.
The 19th century saw the first great expansion of commerce. With global economic growth in orders of magnitude. The same was especially true for the U.S. with its unbridled free population.
The extraordinary growth of global commerce stimulated innovation in the application of non-human power to textile manufacturing, transportation and farming. Retailing saw the invention of department stores, new foods and new materials on a vast scale. The ‘corporation’ was created based on new extraordinary economies of scale along with an associated whole range of new financial instruments.
Europe saw the exodus of millions of people, non-elites, to create new wealth of the U.S.
Historically unprecedented new wealth exploded in the U.S. and much of Europe for the new railroad owners, the new financiers and many of the old elite families. A colossal global middle class was created for the first time in the U.S. and much of Europe.
The combination of fresh markets and innovation created a distinct unique new world of commerce. Automobile, steel and oil industries exploded at the beginning of the 20th century. Much of the great new commercial wealth brought the U.S. to global preeminence. The demands of World War I expanded commerce even further within the global trading system.
The innovations in sanitation that began in the U.S. in the 1840s spread around the globe and with new drugs in the 1940s and 1950s led to a population explosion from a billion people to many billions.
World War II left much of Europe destroyed and the newly positioned American suzerainty to standardize trade norms and trading rules across the globe. The best example is the American airline industry and global use of English in the airport world. The same was true for telephone, media and accounting standards.
The greatest historical commercial explosion arrived in the early 1950s with the rise of non-elite business leaders and the subsequent, 1960s, fall of the American elite. The resulting expansion of American technological rules of trade and a new meritocratic business class led to a detonation of global commerce with America as the commanding power.
The adoption of American technology brought Japan into world-class levels of commerce with further expansion of global commerce.
From the 1960s to 2000 the entire shape of American commerce changed with the top 50 corporations becoming a wholly new top 500 corporations and a steady growth of finance in the American stock markets. Fortunes were made in the new markets for Walmart, transport companies, computer software and a thousand other businesses.
The American innovations in computers and the associated global Internet, by the 21st century, brought a novel world market to the fore. The global market that is reached by the Internet created a fresh commercial boom in the new century with still more fortunes. Billionaires emerged by the thousands.
By the end of the 20th century, a commercial revolution in China brought a fresh global trading force to the market with Japanese technology and a whole new Chinese domestic leviathan.
That is where we stand today.
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