American manufacturers faced US markets swamped with British products, produced by low-paid workers and priced well below competitive rates and forcing many factories out of business. Continental Europe, its agrarian output crippled by the recent war, offered new markets for American staple crops, particularly cotton, wheat, corn and tobacco. As prices soared for agricultural goods, a speculative agrarian land boom ensued in the South and West United States, encouraged by liberal terms for government public land sales. "The entire postwar American economy" observed historian George Dangerfield was "based on a land boom". The inflationary bubble grew from 1815 to 1818, obscuring the general deflationary trends in world prices.