The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy

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Published: Jan 1, 2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18232/20073496.439
Keywords:
Mining, gold rush, price convergence, economic integration, grain trade, de-industrialization, disequilibrium.

América Latina en la Historia Económica is an Open Access publication under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License, i.e. the use of the work and the creation of derived works is permissible, so long as this is not done for commercial purposes and the author is credited.

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James Gerber

Abstract

This paper explores the near-simultaneous development of the gold rush and grain production in California during the early 1850s. Economic models predict that the production of tradable goods such as wheat are unlikely during a mineral boom due to the availability of imports and the high cost of labor and other inputs. Historians have emphasized the effects of immigration and the increase in the size of the local market. A closer examination of the timing and sequencing of production shifts shows that a decline in tradable goods production fits the California case relatively well. In addition, including the timing of technological changes in mining, the use of native American labor, California's relative isolation from the North Atlantic economy, and the discovery of gold in Australia

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Author Biography

James Gerber

James Gerber received his Ph. D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis. He is professor of Economics and director of the International Business Program at San Diego State University. From 2002 to 2009 he served as the director of the Center for Latin American Studies, also at sdsu. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Calgary, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, and the University of Debrecen, in Debrecen, Hungary. His recent publications include Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Growth, Development, and the Quality of Life (2008), with Joan Anderson, and winner of the 2008 Association for Borderlands Studies Book Award; the edited volume Agriculture and Rural Connections in the Pacific, 1500-1900 (2006), with co-editor Lei Guang, and International Economics, 4e (2007).