Ruling Passions

Front Cover

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Copyright Page

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pp. iv-

Contents

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pp. v-

Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America

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pp. 1-20

In recent years, the Journal of Policy History has emerged as a major venue for scholarship on American policy history in the period after 1900. Indeed, it is for this reason that it is often praised as the leading outlet for scholarship on American political history in the world. Only occasionally, however, has it featured essays on the early republic, the Civil ...

Institutional Reality in the Age of Slavery: Taxation and Democracy in the States

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pp. 21-43

On August 13, 1782, Alexander Hamilton complained to Robert Morris about the deplorable condition of politics in the state of New York, and especially the condition of taxation. Morris had appointed Hamilton as receiver of continental taxes for New York, meaning that Hamilton was in charge of collecting New York’s share of the “requisitions” of Congress. ...

The Politics of Procurement: Military Origins of Bureaucratic Autonomy

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pp. 44-73

No U.S. history textbook mentions Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, or Stewart Van Vliet. Yet in certain respects they were five of the most important government officials in the nineteenth-century United States. Each was a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster’s Department, a bureau of the U.S. army entrusted with ...

Promotion, Competition, Captivity: The Political Economy of Coal

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pp. 74-95

So proclaimed the president of Pennsylvania’s Pequa Railroad and Improvement Company in 1849. The importance of coal, the official explained, lay in its utility as an energy source, for which he hailed it as unsurpassed: coal was “’hoarded labor’”—a “treasure reserved by nature to promote and perfect ...

Patent Politics: Intellectual Property, the Railroad Industry, and the Problem of Monopoly

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pp. 196-125

As winter descended on Washington in December 1878, the Forty-fifth Congress gathered for what promised to be a hectic third and final session. Emotions ran high. In this era, Congress habitually reserved much of its business for these brief, intense “lame duck” sessions that fell between the election of legislators in November and the adjournment of ...

Protecting Small Savers: The Political Economy of Economic Security

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pp. 126-145

Admitting, then, that it is eminently desirable to reduce the action of the organized public force to the minimum . . . shall we not say that government can not relieve itself from the necessity of frequent and minute interferences with industry in any other way to so great an extent as by, 1st, insisting on the thorough primary ...

Did Insecure Property Rights Slow Economic Development? Some Lessons from Economic History

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pp. 146-164

Not long ago, a 43-year-old Wonder Bread deliveryman named John Dugger logged on to eBay and, as people sometimes do these days, bought himself a house. Not a shabby one, either. Nine rooms, three stories, rooftop patio, walls of solid stonework—it wasn’t quite a castle, but it put to shame the modest redbrick ranch house ...

Contributors

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pp. 165-166

Back Cover

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