White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The free man moving west did not, of course, know what his flight meant in the American phase of world capitalism's development. He did not understand that he was part of an economic arrangement, dependent for its well-being upon the structure of foreign markets and the paying off of the U. S. industrialists' debts to other countries. ‘Great agricultural surpluses,' economic historians have shown, ‘permitted American capitalism to grow to maturity behind high tariff walls, for our export of foodstuffs made possible the importation of the raw materials and capital needed for the development of American industry.'

By high tariffs, post-Civil War industrialists shut off foreign goods that might compete with their own products on the domestic market; whatever foreign goods and services they needed were bought by the production of surplus agricultural goods. In the last half of the nineteenth century, imports of raw materials for U. S. manufacture rose; imported manufactured goods for the consumer dropped, and the value of exported foodstuffs rose enormously-wheat, by the millions of bushels, pork, by the millions of pounds.