Consolidating Power: Technology, Ideology, and Philadelphia's Growth in the Early Republic

Abstract

Few contemporary American issues are more controversial than the powerful role of corporations (both business and municipal) in society, politics, and the economy. Yet strikingly, few scholars have investigated the deepest historical roots of American corporate power. Most historians who have considered this issue have focused their research on the Gilded Age and beyond because of the post-Civil War rise of industrial capitalism, the increased prominence of corporations on the national scene, and the dramatic growth of city governments in the context of late nineteenth-century large-scale immigration and the provision of citywide service and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, they have minimized the origins of American corporate power in the first decades of the republic, a crucial issue in the development of American business, American cities, and the nation.