<P> The Industrial Revolution involved a shift in the United States from manual labor - based industry to more technical and machine - based manufacturing which greatly increased the overall production and economic growth of the United States, signifying a shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy widely accepted to have been a result of Samuel Slater's introduction of British Industrial methods in textile manufacturing to the United States, and necessitated by the War of 1812 . </P> <P> As Western Europe began industrializing in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the United States remained agrarian in nature and resource processing in its few semi-industrial pursuits, however, as demand for U.S. resources increased, canals and railroads became extremely important to economic growth due to sparse population particularly in areas where resources were rich such as in the Western frontier . This made it necessary for the U.S. to expand its technological capabilities, which led to an Industrial Revolution reaching American shores as entrepreneurs competed and learned from each other to develop better technology, fundamentally and permanently altering the U.S. economy, thrusting it into the new age of industrialization . </P>

What type of economy did the industrial revolution lead us in to