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Consolidating Power: Technology, Ideology, and Philadelphia's Growth in the Early Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Extract

Few contemporary American issues are more controversial than the powerful role of corporations (both business and municipal) in society, politics, and the economy. Yet strikingly, few scholars have investigated the deepest historical roots of American corporate power. Most historians who have considered this issue have focused their research on the Gilded Age and beyond because of the post-Civil War rise of industrial capitalism, the increased prominence of corporations on the national scene, and the dramatic growth of city governments in the context of late nineteenth-century large-scale immigration and the provision of citywide service and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, they have minimized the origins of American corporate power in the first decades of the republic, a crucial issue in the development of American business, American cities, and the nation.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) (2002). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. See for example Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J., 1997);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York,1982);Google Scholar and Platt, Harold L., The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the ChicagoArea, 1880–1930 (Chicago, 1991).Google Scholar

2. See Gilje, Paul, ed., Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early AmericanRepublic (Madison, Wisc., 1997);Google Scholar Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution:Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991);Google Scholar Taylor, Alan, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, (New York, 1995);Google Scholar Watson, Harry L., Liberty and Power: The Politics of JacksonianAmerica (New York, 1990);Google Scholar and Wood, Gordon, The Radicalism of the AmericanRevolution (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

3. This is a formulation adapted from Habermas’s, Jürgen consideration of the“public sphere” as defined in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas and Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).Google Scholar