Monticello-McNeil Fellow
scoop@virginia.edu
"Empire State Building: Interests, Institutions, and the Formation of States and Parties in New York, 1783 – 1850 "
My research concerns the mobilization of economic interests and the political economy of financial and transportation infrastructures in the early republic. By selectively granting legal privileges to entrepreneurs and coteries of inventors and investors, state legislatures offered incentives to those coalitions who most effectively lobbied legislators to enact a vigorous agenda and protect their investments. Capital formation, therefore, catalyzed the development of partisan corporations and institutions. Over time, alliances among economic interests mirrored the partisanship developing within legislative caucuses, making state-created corporations and interests permanent institutional sites for political development and conflict before the emergence of autonomous parties during the Jacksonian Era. My chapters are a series of case studies set in New York; they concern banks, steamboat monopolies, the Erie Canal, the Anti-Masonic critique of corporate privileges, and the founding of the New York and Erie Railroad.