Civic Economies: Commerce, Regulation, and Public Space in the Antebellum City
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Date
2014-07-17
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Between 1790 and 1860, the governance of Baltimore and Philadelphia transformed to meet the demands of a capitalist economy predicated on moving people and goods ever more rapidly and indiscriminately. Far from being an era of diminished governmental oversight, however, the early republic saw a dramatic expansion in local and state regulation of urban economies and spaces, as newly minted municipal corporations endeavored to carve out spheres of economic and political influence and protect consumers and public welfare. They did so through market houses, licensing, product inspection, nuisance laws, and a bevy of other instruments. In response, men and women from across the social spectrum—from widows selling oranges to railroad corporations—shaped urban regulation and promoted their own visions of the market, enacting a civic economy. Through a study of thousands of petitions to city leaders, as well as city records and legislation, “Civic Economies” builds upon recent scholarship that has recovered a robust tradition of regulation in antebellum America. But it goes further to show how local variations, competing legal interpretations, and dynamics of class, gender, and race suffused regulatory institutions.
“Civic Economies” also probes the myriad forms and meanings of capitalism in antebellum America. Understanding capitalism in the context of human-scale spaces like the market house, sidewalk, and neighborhood, petitioners tended not to view regulation and capitalism as oppositional forces. Beginning in the 1820s, however, other conceptions of capitalism—emblematized by railroads, global trade, and abstract markets—exerted greater influence over urban governance. Increasingly, economic and political elites used regulation to promote the free and efficient circulation of people, capital, and goods, rather than to ensure fair competition and just prices. Responsibility for market governance devolved from the state to urban capitalists operating through corporations and boards of trade. Municipal product inspection collapsed in the 1840s under the weight of free trade arguments, while private market houses proliferated at the expense of municipal market houses. Meanwhile, city leaders embarked on transforming urban space and governance in the image of nineteenth-century liberalism, promoting freedom of mobility and anchoring social inequalities in the built landscape—a pair of antebellum legacies that continues to shape American urbanism.
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Keywords
Regulation, Capitalism