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9 Corporations and the Coalescence of an Elite Class in Philadelphia Andrew M. Schocket Nearly all the historical literature focusing on class struggles and negotiation has analyzed working class formation; that on the Atlantic World is no different. However, working people were not the only ones increasingly conscious of class. The chapters in this book by Konstantin Dierks, Susan Branson, and Jennifer Goloboy that analyze the evolution of middle-class sensibilities, culture, and friendship testify to the growing scholarly interest in the middling sort’s emergence into a self-aware bourgeoisie constructed as much or more through conscious self-conception and the shaping of a middle-class discourse than through economic differentiation. Nonetheless, amid the instability of the early modern Atlantic rim, members of elites were at least as concerned with class formation and class interests as were their less well-off neighbors. Indeed, like most privileged people in all times and places, the small groups at the top of the social and economic ladders of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic World tended to be more cohesive in the pursuit of class interests and more articulate in their definition of class than those whose hands could not reach the higher rungs. Furthermore, those elites gained or kept their high position precisely because of their ability to leverage broad access to natural resources, to finished goods, to others’ free or coerced labor, to information, and to capital from around the Atlantic littoral . To examine the transatlantic context of one elite group’s efforts at class formation sheds light onto local class relations, the formation of a transatlantic wealthy class, and the coalition of an Atlantic World elite in the midst of revolutionary convulsion. Historians studying the early United States have long debated the extent to which the American Revolution upended colonial elites and inhibited these groups’ ability to reassert themselves economically and politically in the wake of the American Revolution.1 In the new northern states, various groups of rich men competed with alliances of artisans and farmers over the political and economic power that had been mostly the province of powerful urban cliques under British rule. Scholars investigating early national politics as well as early national elites have noted how small coteries of men in the various states worked to use their economic leverage and to revise the new political structures (especially state and national government) to recover some degree of the political power they had lost during the Revolution.2 While such studies constantly note that many of the men most active in this reactionary project greatly admired Britain and its institutions, they have not done enough to illuminate the ways that a few small groups of AngloAmericans adopted British know-how and benefited from British capital in their efforts to solidify their economic position and to regain some modicum of the influence they had lost.3 Transatlantic flows of capital and information were integral to the formation of Philadelphia’s wealthy, corporate class at the end of the eighteenth century. By placing a subset of Philadelphia’s postRevolutionary merchant and legal elite into a greater Atlantic context, we can better delineate the process through which that elite aimed to reassert its power and authority. At the close of the American Revolution, few in the Atlantic World were more concerned with their precarious economic, political, and social class status than Philadelphia’s wealthy merchants, lawyers, and gentlemen. Because many of the wealthier merchants had been loyalists or perceived loyalists , the ones who stayed after the Revolution held a precarious position. Though they had managed to help wrest their own sovereignty away from Britain, they now constituted a typical post-colonial elite, negotiating an area between a greater world they aspired to join and the domestic conditions they schemed to dominate. A small group of elite Philadelphians chose a European vehicle to ensure class stability and to claim continued economic and political dominance. Influenced by British writings on and examples of corporations , especially in banking and internal improvement, some Philadelphia merchants initially saw the business corporation as a convenient legal, financial, and institutional structure to provide services such as banking and insurance and to foster the construction and administration of infrastructure such as internal improvements. Soon, however, the small community of corporate insiders, disappointed and frightened by their limited influence over state politics, used the corporation to wrest control over much of economic policy and transportation policy from the state, insulating decision making from what they perceived as the fickle...

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