Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, 1607-2001

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Our armed forces are mighty, but the United States ultimately dominates the world economically, not militarily. John Steele Gordon's Empire of Wealth provides a fresh look at American history and the fundamental reasons for our success. This accessible history is overdue: American economic history has usually been the province of specialists, academicians, or ideologues. This richly detailed account is replete with fascinating detail. For example, Steele notes that Thomas Jefferson's visceral hatred of banks left the U.S. with the world's worst-regulated banking system for most of the next two centuries.

Ron Chernow

"Impressive. ... A deft, lively handling of an ambitious project that would have daunted almost any other writer."

William Grimes

Mr. Gordon, a columnist for American Heritage who has written a history of Wall Street and the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, does not offer much in the way of analysis. Rather, he presents the essential ideas and innovations that have propelled the American economy since its earliest days, and illustrates them with striking examples. He has produced the written equivalent of a PBS "American Experience" documentary, a gaudy cavalcade of facts, outsize personalities and fascinating inventions that moves along at a brisk clip.
— The New York Times

Thomas Kessner

Gordon is a knowledgeable and relentlessly optimistic chronicler, relating with great panache how America's turn toward liberty, growth and innovation produced wonders of synergy. He captures well the epiphanies of inventors, industrialists and speculators as these legendary self-made men spun together the fibers of American dominance. And he vividly recreates the climate of exigency that made America's wars such powerful economic catalysts. An Empire of Wealth offers a Promethean narrative of America's rise to economic dominance. Gordon's account is both highly readable and enlightening.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

The word "epic" in the subtitle is a tip-off that instead of a critical history of the American economy, this book is a celebration of it. Nothing wrong with that, especially when the tale's told breezily and accurately. In fact, Gordon (The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street) notes the many stumbles and the frequent foolishness and corruption that attended the nation's rise as an economic powerhouse. The larger story of success is, in fact, an extraordinary one. The trouble is that the American economy, like every other, bends much out of shape. It has always provided opportunity but always with too much inequality. A full history of the American economy would take this into consideration in the past as well as the present, and Gordon's doesn't. Also, his book sometimes wanders off into irrelevant subjects, like the origins of the computer, but his grasp of the larger picture is sure and his prose bright. His chapter on Northern and Southern Civil War finances is a model of its kind. Those seeking an introduction to the general history of American economic power will find few better places to start, as long as they keep in mind that the nation's economy is not perfect, its benefits not unalloyed and its future domination of other economic powerhouses by no means assured. Agent, Katinka Matson. (Oct. 5) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

No single volume can do full justice to the history of the American economy, but An Empire of Wealth makes a good effort. Gordon follows the story of the American economy from the first English settlements into the new millennium. This staunchly Hamiltonian book will shock readers accustomed to American economic histories that cast Ida Tarbell and William Jennings Bryan as heroes and Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller as villains. Gordon argues that most of the nation's economic problems result from the Jeffersonian legacy of weak, localized, and poorly regulated financial institutions-a legacy that persisted into the savings-and-loan catastrophe of the Reagan administration. The absence of a central bank caused many of the excessive booms and busts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the absence of good central-banking governance contributed materially to the Great Depression. Gordon also gives the Progressives short shrift, arguing that private self-regulation generally worked better than toothless and often counterproductive government attempts. At its best when Gordon enlivens and explains early financial history-recent history is too complex to be captured fully in a short and general account, and Gordon's revisionist agenda makes his tale more complicated still-An Empire of Wealth fills a need: it recounts the history of the American economy from the standpoint of those who like it and the aÛuence it brings.

Library Journal

Gordon, a contributing editor for American Heritage often heard on public radio's Marketplace, has managed to write an engrossing and comprehensive survey of U.S. economic activity from Colonial times through the fall of communism and the S&L crisis. He presents even the least vivid economic history, such as the late 19th-century debate over the gold standard, in a fascinating manner. Devoting commensurate space to each period, he ably presents the panoply of American economics through wars, technical innovations, financial booms and busts, social changes, and government regulation. His judgments are balanced and less polemical than Thomas J. DiLorenzo's in the recent How Capitalism Saved America, though like DiLorenzo he does do some anti-capitalism myth busting. He portrays 19th-century "robber barons" in generally positive terms, and while he praises Franklin Roosevelt for restoring American confidence after the Great Depression, he also argues that most of the New Deal programs were unsuccessful and economically shortsighted. This remarkably detailed and interesting book is highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.-Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Forget about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: American history is all about the Benjamins. America's present poised-for-empire stance is the logical consequence of American supremacy in the marketplace, writes financial historian Gordon (A Thread Across the Ocean, 2002, etc.). It's not only that the present economy is so vast and so varied, but also that "virtually every major development in technology in the 20th century-which was far and away the most important century in the history of technology-originated in the US or was principally industrialized and turned into consumer products here." It has not always been so, Gordon goes on to report. But he makes it clear that the European presence on the North American continent, in a variety of successive regimes, has always involved finance somewhere in the equation; as Gordon notes, Columbus's expedition included an accountant, the Jamestown settlement was a corporate venture, the founding of the Carolinas was a result of an overcrowded sugarcane industry in the Caribbean, and so forth. Some of what Gordon writes about is not news, but he brings considerable nuance to bear on his interpretations of our history: Massachusetts was able to take the world lead in shipbuilding, he writes by way of example, because, although its labor costs were very high, its material costs were so low that "New England could build a ship for about half the cost of building one in England," and this helped build an American economy that would soon become self-sufficient-one more reason not to be governed from abroad. Gordon's narrative is full of rich data on such matters as the growth of the transcontinental railroads, the origin of income andother common taxes, the abandonment of the gold standard, the rise of the consumer economy, and-most interesting of all-economic misjudgments and their reverberations throughout history. Solid raw material with plenty of value added. Just the thing for economics wonks, then, but lively enough to make for good airplane reading. Agency: John Brockman Associates