Looking Backward: Large Print

Looking Backward: Large PrintBy Edward BellamyThe decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873-1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath.[7] Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms-monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts-began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate.[7] The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.