Politics of Property: Urban Democracy in the Age of Global Capital, Boston 1865–1900

The dissertation offers a new perspective on the transformation American capitalism in the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the urban and political dimensions of that momentous process. With Boston as a focal point, it examines the consolidation of a North American market by looking at the conflict between two groups of businessmen: the city’s elite business class, led by merchants, bankers, and financiers, who sought to prioritize the imperatives of an interconnected continental economy, and a lower-middle-class coalition of shopkeepers, small manufacturers, and skilled workers, who espoused robust metropolitan development based on an expanded public sector and the proliferation of proprietary businesses. The dissertation explores the rival political economic visions of the two groups and their clashes in urban politics. It analyzes the battles they waged over fundamental policy questions such as municipal finance, tax reform, metropolitan integration, and the uses of urban space, interpreting them as competing political efforts to define the contours of the modern American economy.