This book is about the coexistence of democracy and development in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Democratic institutions and electoral practices were far from perfect; violence, fraud, and disfranchising legislation blemish the historical record, particularly after 1890 and particularly in the South. But we cannot understand the American political economy of that time without acknowledging the impact of popular sentiment on both the policy designs of the major parties and the construction of developmental institutions. Participation was high, political opinion was informed, organized insurgency was common, and people felt that the outcome of elections mattered. In all these ways, the late nineteenth century was a far more democratic era than the present and, compared with other developing countries then and since, the United States was well on the democratic side of the spectrum.

In this book, economic development is equated with industrialization: the transition from a predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial society, including the capacity to develop and export high-technology manufactured products in a competitive world economy. This is obviously a more demanding conception of development than some scholars would posit. The last condition, for example, is intended to exclude cases where industrialization occurs so slowly that a country can never compete with other advanced nations in the world economy. Here too, the United States was clearly at the upper end of the scale compared with other developing countries then and since.