Browsing by Subject "Economic history"

Variously romanticized as the repository of American Protestantism, free market capitalism, and self-sufficient individualism, or defined by material actions of conquest and colonization, the history of the Rocky Mountain West is a complicated constellation of myth and reality. This dissertation evaluates the efforts of three religious communities to negotiate a place within that constellation. Northern Arapaho wage laborers in central Wyoming, Mormon merchants in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Roman Catholic hard-rock miners in Butte, Montana, leveraged their religious and ethnic identities to negotiate places of sovereignty in the western landscape. While each case study presents a distinct relationship between religion and labor, each is grounded in the materiality of exchange and economics in order to show the inseparability of religion from the economic practices that enabled the creation and endurance of nineteenth-century Western communities. Despite the concealing mechanisms of a single, idealized trajectory of American nationhood, the narration of national space was haunted and disrupted by the persistence of alternate, but interconnected, religious geographies, which re-scripted hegemonic narratives of American religious and economic exceptionalism. Using the tools of archival research and the collection of oral histories, this dissertation explores the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the pastoral heartland of the American myth.

The advent and generalization of digital computing machines in the twentieth century spelled a wholesale revolution in communication technologies. As with every technological revolution, this one came irreducibly co-involved with transformations in the economic sphere. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this meant financialization, which comprised an exponential expansion in the size and power of finance, a reversal in preeminence between the “real” and the financial economy, and the saturation of an increasing proportion of social processes with financial logics and evaluative criteria. None of these developments would have been possible without digital computers. This dissertation, Cash Flows: A Media Archeology of Financial Engineering, 1958-1987, details the involution between late-twentieth century finance and digital media, demonstrating that to understand finance, we must understand the digital, and to understand the digital, we must understand finance.Financialization and the computerization of finance can be accounted for, I show, under the rubric of financial engineering, a distinct mode of financial operation that emerged beginning in 1958. Financial engineering combines a novel conceptual scheme with novel technologies. The conceptual scheme, no-arbitrage, takes over for earlier neoclassical understandings of economic and financial operation based on equilibrium; it shifts the responsibility for the maintenance of “true” prices from the counterbalancing forces of spontaneous rational actors to the concerted efforts of financial theorists. Concomitantly, I show, it uses digital computers to transform financial theory from a post facto, empirical, and descriptive venture to an ex ante, speculative, and constructive one. Financial theory becomes a real-time data processing operation. Drawing on media theory and the philosophy of technology and updating the foundational account of human-machine interaction offered by the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, Cash Flows offers a way to understand how media transformation drove financialization, what financialization tells us about media transformation, and what consequences we should expect from the continued generalization of digital technologies. The revolution of the digital, as I detail, involves a profound change in the relationship between machines and symbols. Rather than simply reproducing symbols—a capacity machines had possessed since at least the fifteenth century—digital machines operationalized them. As Cash Flows argues, the fundamental factor in last century’s financial transformation was the newfound ability of machines to transform symbols into actions. Digital computers enabled finance to machinically operationalize social and subjective processes humans carry out as a matter of course. Concomitantly, then, the saturation an increasing proportion of social processes by digital media is equally finance’s conquest of the social. All the consequences we see within the finance narrowly defined—from the construction of totalizing interconnection between elements that had previously been understood as belonging to separate spheres; to the transformation of psychic and social flows into value-generating data streams; to the enlistment of the human as a co-processor of digital data; to more frequent, more widely ranging, and more severe crises amplified by feedback loops between humans and machines—are equally the social consequences of digitization.

My contention in this dissertation is that the history of liberal political thought contains two incompatible models of children's political status, which in turn produce two incompatible answers to the question "Is liberalism compatible with civic education?" The first model, which I describe as "the apolitical child", emerges out of the social contract tradition in liberal political thought dominant during the 17th and 18th centuries. This radical departure from previous conceptions of children's place within political communities served to weaken the authority of absolutist monarchs over subjects born within their territories. In making political obligations voluntary, this tradition justified either exclusive parental authority over children's education or a program of education concerned with preserving children's capacity to voluntarily choose their political obligations upon coming of age. The second model, which I describe as "the child as citizen", develops out of a later liberal tradition concerned with preserving then existing liberal regimes against the growing threats of illiberal populism, religious fanaticism and political violence. As the political power of the working classes grew during the 19th century, the risk of public support for illiberal policies became increasingly salient to liberal political thinkers. In abandoning consent as the ground of political obligations, these liberals also abandoned the model of the apolitical child. Instead, they saw children as citizens whose attachment to liberal political institutions would be decisive in whether those liberal institutions would survive.

This dissertation shows how an array of policymakers, invested in uprooting an unequal political economy descended from the plantation system and Jim Crow, gravitated to education as a centerpiece of development strategy, and why so many are still disappointed in its outcomes. By looking at state-wide policymaking in North Carolina and policy effects in the state’s black belt counties, this study shows why the civil rights movement was vital for shifting state policy in former Jim Crow states towards greater investment in human resources. By breaking down employment barriers to African Americans and opening up the South to new people and ideas, the civil rights movement fostered a new climate for economic policymaking, and a new ecosystem of organizations flourished to promote equitable growth. At first, they sought to create a high-wage economy based on the industrial North. But as branch-plant recruitment faltered as a development strategy, these policy advocates turned to worker co-operatives, entrepreneurial incubators, and improved education as an alternative. Kids were the new cash crop in part because policymakers came to believe that economic growth—for the locality, for the state, for the nation, for all countries at all times—depended on innovators and entrepreneurs. American workers, too expensive to perform physically grueling industrial chores in an unevenly governed global economy, had to be ready and willing to toss away old skills and acquire new ones to fit whatever tasks the innovators found humans still useful to perform. By stressing the economic value of education, these policy advocates succeeded—for a time—in boosting state and local spending. But this came at the cost of democratic rationales for public schools. Moreover, this approach failed to stabilize rural communities hurt by manufacturing job losses.

This dissertation is a collection of three chapters all pertaining to institutional economics. In short, the eld of institutional economics is an outgrowth of public economics, in the sense that in many cases he key institutions that frame economic decisionmaking are the product of public policy. However this is not exclusive. Institutional economics' key contribution is the acknowledgement that cultural and social institutions --- often developed organically over the course of centuries --- can play as signicant a role in individuals' economic choices as governmental policy. In the pages that follow, we will address the economic impact of cultural and political institutions in three contexts: Judicial decisionmaking in Islamic courts, the effects

of negative health shocks on retirement savings, and the tradeoff between retirement savings and investment in durable goods.

The commercialization of scientific discoveries into innovation has traditionally been the purview of large corporations operating central R&D laboratories through much of the past century. The past four decades have seen this model being gradually supplanted by a more decentralized system of universities and VC-backed startups that have displaced large corporations as the conductors of scientific research. This dissertation tries to understand how firms create and exploit scientific knowledge in this changing structure of American innovation. The first study examines how scientific knowledge can expand markets for technology and thereby encourage the entry of new science-based firms into invention. The argument is tested in the context of the U.S. patent market and finds that patents citing scientific articles tend to be traded more often, even after controlling for various proxies of patent quality. The second study explores why some American firms started investing in scientific research in the early twentieth century. The chapter relies on a newly assembled panel dataset of innovating firms consisting of their investments in science, patenting, financials and ownership between 1926 and 1940. The empirical patterns reveal that the beginnings of corporate research in America were driven by companies at the technological frontier attempting to take advantage of opportunities for innovation made possible by scientific advances. This investment was especially pronounced for firms based in scientific fields that were underdeveloped in the United States. The final study asks why startups are more likely to bring scientific advances to market. The existing literature has explained the higher innovative propensity of some startups by their superior scientific capabilities. However, it is also possible that the apparent innovativeness of startups may be a result of firm choice, rather than inherent capability gaps with respect to incumbents. Startups may choose novel products that are riskier but offer higher payoffs because they pay a higher entry cost in the form of investments in new factories, sales and distribution channels. I test this entry cost mechanism in the context of the American laser industry which responded to an exogenous influx of Soviet laser science following the end of the Cold War.

This dissertation studies the political economy of city status and its historical role in promoting development. The status of a city was a set of political institutions that altered the governance of towns it was bestowed upon, making towns into cities and townsmen into citizens. The three essays of this dissertation explore why and how alternative city-level political institutions may result in different development outcomes, and how individuals may dynamically interact with and respond to political institutions. I highlight the role of the distribution of political power between the landed and the urban elites as key to understanding the consequences of city status. In this dissertation, I utilize a variety of methods such as archival research, game-theoretic modeling, historical and qualitative analysis, case studies, geographic information system mapping as well as econometric analysis.

In Chapter 2, I develop a formal model of city formation with political control by landed or urban elites. I show how technological limitations faced by the landed elites, a result of their dependence on the scarcely available land as a production input, constrain optimal allocation decisions for employing complementary production inputs, labor, and productive public goods. The model predicts that political control by landed elites will result in cities with a smaller equilibrium population size and with fewer public goods being provided.

In Chapter 3, I argue that institutions privileging urban at the expense of landed elites may generate better outcomes even in the absence of democracy and may actually outperform democracy if it leads to political control by landed elites. Using original town-level data, I draw on evidence from an 1869 city reform in Congress Poland which deprived three-quarters of the 452 cities of their city status, giving political rights to landed but not urban elites. I show that degraded cities experienced a 64 percentage points slower population growth over the next 40 years. City status was associated with greater public goods provision and more effective judiciary in remaining cities and contributed to a relative agrarianization of degraded cities. I discuss implications for our understanding of the role of inclusive institutions in promoting development.

Chapter 4 explores how individuals may contest unfavorable formal institutions, resulting in the development of norms that directly counter these institutions. The theoretical framework developed in this chapter serves to provide an explanation for how formal institutions may persist even long after their demise, and why the direction of this persistence does not need to replicate equilibria that formal institutions were meant to sustain. To investigate this empirically, I study the long-term effects of the 1869 city reform to show how formal city-level institutions that have been unfavorable to entrepreneurship have led to the development of strong pro-entrepreneurship norms that have persisted until the present and make the populations of towns with previously unfavorable institutions more entrepreneurial now.

Development has been studied as a project pursued by imperialist nations to strengthen the social and economic order of empire and to curb communism. It was deployed just as frequently, however, in sovereign spaces. This project examines the efforts of the Italian intellectuals who led the Svimez thinktank to organize the economic development of southern Italy in the post-war era. I draw upon materials from Italy’s national archive and those published by Svimez between 1968 and 1988. Whereas imperial development sought to strengthen empire, Italian development sought to strengthen the nation. To understand the intellectual origins of post-war Italian development I turn to events that rocked the nation during the interwar period and appeared to many as a national crisis. That included labor uprisings in response to rising prices beginning in 1919 and the financial crisis of the 1930s. These events oriented technical intellectuals within Milan’s Catholic and socialist milieu to social issues and the wholeness of the nation. After the war, Svimez leaders continued to focus on such questions. They deployed statistical and economic techniques to show southern stagnation was also a crisis that threatened the nation’s integrity.

To address it, they turned to capital. Industrial capital would extend the nation’s economic fabric to the places where it was most irrational and produce the homogeneity believed to be a defining characteristic of a nation. Christian Democracy, experiencing its own electoral crisis, supported the calls for a regional development agency but reframed it as a project of social justice. This language derived from documents they drafted while organizing their party in 1942, which imagined catholic social doctrine as the foundation of the post-fascist state. Italian development became part of the post-fascist project to renew the state’s moral authority and its role as a mediator between capital and labor. I conclude Italian development was response to a national crisis that envisioned a restoration and expansion of the conditions of Italian capitalism.

In Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?

This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama.

The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric.

Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development.

The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.

During the 1550s, a warehouse was constructed in Antwerp with funds from both the city government and a private investor. This building, the Tapissierspand, became the global center for selling and distributing tapestries of extraordinary beauty, exquisite craftsmanship, and exorbitant cost. The construction of the building indicates that the very nature of how tapestries were made and purchased was changing in the 1550s. Although Antwerp's fairs had long been convenient locations for agents to find luxury items that might please their wealthy clients, like with many luxury trades, tapestry sales were shifting from strictly commissioned sales to include on spec sales. The Tapissierspand was the ideal place for a dealer to purchase multiple already-made tapestries and load them onto the waiting ships in Antwerp's busy harbor for export and resale abroad. The city's export registers document that thousands of yards of tapestry were shipped this way.

The regulatory environment in Antwerp was much less strict than in other cities and this permitted freer interactions within guilds and across industries. The city was for this reason a desirable location for craftsmen to work and sell. But because the strict royal ordinances delivered throughout the 1530s and 1540s were frequently uninforced, workers in the industry were forced to find other ways to manage the large risk inherent in the tapestry trade. The development of the Tapissierspand in Antwerp was an effort on the part of merchants and the city to abate risk. The city could continue to entice merchants if it could provide the right opportunities and environment. However, by the sixteenth century, the constant hyper-vigilance the city had experienced throughout the fifteenth century during frequent times of war and financial difficulty shaped the way the city and its occupants viewed business. In a large sense, everything came down to risk, and how to manage it and minimize it.

At a time of upheaval and mismanagement, survival and financial success through the reduction of risk became of primary importance. Tapestry weaving carried inherent--and large--risks. Raw materials were expensive, and workshops often did not have the capital needed for on spec weaving. The purchase of on spec tapestries without any guarantees of quality or origin was risky for buyers. Thus the Tapissierspand's story is one of people seeking to maximize economic advantage and minimize risk. The Tapissierspand allowed buyers and sellers to minimize risk by facilitating exchange of knowledge, assessment of quality, negotiation of prices and commissions, and extension of credit.

This dissertation will examine the historical precedents in Antwerp that allowed the Tapissierspand to develop, and the ways in which the Pand functioned to expand trade while reducing risk for both buyers and sellers by reducing the risks inherent in the industry.

Marinus Van Reymerswaele's painting of 1542, The Lawyer's Office, was a completely new type of image in the history of art. It shows a lawyer and his assistant behind a desk strewn with briefs, wax seals and money. A complex set of historical circumstances at the interface of art, economics, and legal history in sixteenth century Antwerp explain this painting's appearance and significance. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp became a locus of unprecedented artistic production caused by the dramatic growth of its mercantile population, its highly organized commercial infrastructure, and its competitive business atmosphere. These developments stimulated a new sophistication in the art market and an energetic approach to acquiring and collecting, supported by publicly-funded venues to mass-market paintings. Over the course of the sixteenth century, artists invented new subjects to meet public demand. Many of these were radically new. One of these artists, Marinus Van Reymerswaele (c. 1490-1546) made distinctive paintings of lawyers, bankers, and moneychangers which relate to fundamental changes in the legal and commercial infrastructure in the sixteenth century. In just one generation, the Habsburg authority centralized the political and legal landscape in the Netherlands. As the prized economic and cultural center of Habsburg territories, Antwerp was transformed.

This dissertation links the development of consumption practices and the rise of new pictorial subjects introduced in Antwerp with the changing business and legal climate of the city during the sixteenth century. Through an investigation of unpublished home inventories recorded between 1528 and 1588, it clarifies the acquisition preferences of the Antwerp public at large, considering both changing preferences for panel and linen paintings as well as for novel and traditional images alike. This reassessment of painting consumption reveals a starkly more conservative approach to buying images than previously assumed, underscoring the rarity of everyday life subjects in Antwerp domestic spaces. As a painter operating within this market, Marinus van Reymerswaele invented a new brand of painting -- the new old master painting -- that not only addressed broad social concerns sparked by Habsburg political, mercantile, and legal reforms, but also built on long-established Netherlandish visual traditions. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, his paintings became more desired by collectors but lost their topicality as memories of Antwerp's political anxieties faded into the past.

This dissertation explores how the depiction of gender-differentiated economic roles in women’s magazines contributed to shaping Spanish women as economic actors during the first 30 years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1968). The analysis focuses on eight publications: Y, Revista para la Mujer and Teresa, published by the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) of Spain’s fascist Falange party; Senda and Para Nosotras, published by the women’s wing of the lay religious group Acción Católica (Catholic Action); and commercial magazines El Hogar y la Moda, Marisol, Ama, and Telva. My interdisciplinary methodology combines a close reading of these magazines with an analysis of relevant economic data from this historical period. This approach sheds new light on the conflict between magazines’ idealized rhetoric, which centered primarily around models of feminine domesticity and motherhood, and the desperate economic circumstances that many Spanish women endured under Francoist rule.

The years immediately following Spain’s brutal Civil War (1936-1939) were marked by violent repression and devastating material conditions, which were exacerbated by the Franco regime’s failed attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency. In my analysis of magazines published during the 1940s, I track the discursive strategies that editors used in an attempt to shift the blame for the country’s post-war economic woes away from the regime and onto women. I then explore how magazines’ discourses evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, as the regime began to embrace more liberal economic policies and reopen Spain to international trade. I demonstrate how comparatively more permissive models of economic womanhood appeared in the magazines of the 1950s in the context of Spain’s reentry into global society. But I argue that a reactionary backlash arose in the magazines of the 1960s as more and more women began to actually embrace economic opportunities and identities that fell outside traditional norms.

Throughout this work, my analysis draws attention to the numerous contradictions that existed, both between women’s magazines’ messages and their readers lived experiences, and within magazines’ discourses themselves. I therefore challenge previous readings of these popular media texts as straightforward propaganda tools, arguing instead that they served as a crucial site in an ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony in Francoist Spain. While magazines’ editors sought to reinforce a dominant narrative regarding women’s roles in Spanish society against the looming threat of potential counter-narratives, I argue that their attempts were not entirely successful. Rather, I demonstrate how didactic elements like fictional dialogues, and collaborative components like advice columns, enabled provocative queries, and even dissent, to enter into and disrupt the discursive exchange between editors and readers.

This dissertation examines Haiti's crucial role in the re-making of the Atlantic World in the early 19th century. The point of departure for this work is Haiti's Declaration of Independence in 1804 and my research explores how events in Haiti raised profound questions about revolutionary legitimacy and national sovereignty. The emergence of Haiti as an independent nation fueled unprecedented international debates about racial hierarchy, the connections between freedom and sovereignty, and the intertwining of ideological and political relationships among nations and empires. While these debates came to be resolved in part during the next two centuries, they remain alive today both for specific nations and for the international community.

The intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.

This dissertation explores the emergence of Millennium Development and the promise to end poverty by 2015. After exploring the global scale phenomena, the project turns to the implementation of the "end of poverty" in the model Millennium Village of Sauri, Kenya.

Social and cultural form is being reshaped by the increasing centrality of logistical science to everyday lived experience. Formerly confined to the governance of commodity chains, logistics’ influence has grown into a pervasive social rationality that promotes endless circulation and perpetual uncertainty as inextricable realities of contemporary life. Its ubiquity, I argue, is creating an altogether new global economic system which I call the logistical mode of production. As a planetary system of governance and control, the logistical mode of production operates on many geographical and temporal registers at once. My project thus employs a multi-scalar approach to capture the diversity of spaces and speeds that simultaneously converge to form our new logistical reality. I begin with the largest scale, i.e. the planetary logistical infrastructure that has historically been defined by the global supply chain. Its most significant actor, Amazon.com, has radically restructured commodity chains to service its worldwide retail network and fulfill its promise of rapid on-demand consumption. Beneath Amazon’s reconfiguration of the global supply chain exists what I call the social supply chain. It is defined by on-demand service apps like Uber and Deliveroo, whose platforms redirect logistical media’s governance of commodity circulation to control and coordinate human movement through urban space. As significant conductors of human circulation, mobile platforms not only reshape physical geographies, but restructure individual subjectivity along logistical lines. I therefore conclude my project by analyzing how the logistical mode of production creates individual subjects that embody its ideals of ceaseless circulation, infinite flexibility, and ruthless efficiency.