I was on another ferry ride to the San Juan Islands, that last frontier before Alaska. In fact, at various points on those islands, we can gaze at the Canadian shores across the water. Most of my previous rides were during the colder months of autumn and spring, so I was almost always the lone motorcyclist on the ferry. This time it was a summer group ride, and there were several other unknown motorcyclists waiting at the terminal for the ferry back to Anacortes.

Among those riders was this older gentleman riding a 500cc Royal Enfield. The signature classic look and that inimitable thump, even though muffled by the newer pipes, were instantly discernible. I walked over to him and mentioned how much I had enjoyed touring on these motorcycles, but of course, it was over a decade ago, and it was also the older 350cc variant. Interestingly, he knew exactly what I was talking about. Even though a Westerner, he has evidently been living in Nepal for a while and has done extensive touring of the Indian subcontinent. The more I spoke with him, the more I realized how well-versed he was about the machine’s quirks, subcontinent geography, and the motorcycle culture there.

Just to put all this in perspective – my conversation is with an American several generations older than me, riding a 100-year-old motorcycle brand originally invented in Britain, now Indian-engineered and exported to the US. While I am on a British-designed Triumph, which was most likely manufactured in Thailand. We are having this impromptu talk at a ferry terminal, in a corner so distant from England, Thailand, or India. Even in our near past, the possibility of this happening would have been low. But not anymore, it seems like both humans and the products we engineer travel the world.

Even though the conversation itself wasn’t about the US, this situation might just be another silent illustration of the American global role. It might sound like a leap, but we are in a more cohesive, connected world because of the early American Federalists. That causal chain from the formation of an experimental republic to the current world is long, tortuous, and involves several complex factors. But, beneath all the layers, the prototype for globalized order emerged from Americana — traced to the framing of the Constitution.

American Federalism unintentionally created a large open market where a set of States were forced to play well with each other, mostly through the Commerce Clause in the Constitution. While most of the world kept creating protectionist barriers to growth, Americans ended up leveraging a large open domestic market to expand. It’s a quintessential illustration of Adam Ferguson’s “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. It wasn’t engineered, but it manifested because of the structural incentives created by US Federalism. With access to a large market and with the right institutional incentives, American enterprise and innovation expanded.

Most human history is riddled with strife, with brief periods of peace. But the American situation was a unique convergence of industrialization with refined institutional design executed at scale, along with some geographical advantage. None of these attributes is unprecedented, but historical accidents rarely allowed such a confluence of multiple favorable factors.

That convergence allowed peace, followed by prosperity. But nothing happens in isolation — interconnected systems influence each other. A positive feedback loop through markets channeled into geopolitics, eventually enabling the global expansion of American firms into foreign markets. Market institutions are wired to politics because one relies on the framework provided by the other. They are essentially co-developed and co-dependent systems. The ideas, the learnings, and the overall state of the market will shape policy through various channels. The reverse is also true. When healthy, they keep each other in check, and the overall system evolves in beneficial ways. Such an American expansion extended several best practices to the rest of the world – including the idea that everyone should play well with each other.

The formation of one of the most consequential republics, their role in World War II, and the reshaping of global institutions through those learnings created a new world order. At its core, this order, with all its flaws, is a rough blueprint of the contractual union of several republics – all retaining their political identity but coexisting without cultural and economic barriers. With the risk of sounding rhetorical, this reflects Alexander Hamilton-James Madison Americana.

Republished at ridersmodel.com