Economic Developments
What to know
Economic questions link policy choices to regional development. Know mercantilism and the Navigation Acts, colonial staple economies, and the early national debate between Hamilton's program (assumption of state debts, a national bank, excise taxes, tariffs, internal improvements) and Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism. Understand the Bank of the United States controversy, tariff fights (1828 "Tariff of Abominations," nullification), and the market revolution: canals, steamboats, railroads, the telegraph, commercial agriculture, and early factories such as Lowell. Know the cotton gin's effect on slavery's expansion, the Panic of 1837, and the beginnings of organized labor.
Traps
Avoid monocausal answers. The cotton gin did not "cause" slavery-it made short-staple cotton profitable and accelerated slavery's westward expansion. Hamilton's bank was not unconstitutional per se; the argument was over implied powers. Tariffs helped some manufacturers but hurt southern consumers and exporters, so regional interests mattered. "Market revolution" means commercialization and wage labor, not just industrialization.
Worked example
Trace a cause-effect chain: cotton gin -> profitable upland cotton -> expansion into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana -> domestic slave trade -> intensified sectional conflict. Rule of thumb: connect an invention to a market incentive, then to a labor system, then to politics.