State Debt, State Capitalism, and State Reform: Infrastructure Politics and Fiscal Constitutionalism in the United States, 1818-1848

 The history of internal improvements in the United States exposes perennial questions of American political development. It asks us to examine complex interdependences, to explore relationships between State and economy, to discern interactions between constitutional structures and constitutional change, to uncover tensions between path-dependency and institutional development, and to elucidate exchanges between politics and political economy. To illuminate these intersecting dynamics, this study examines the prodigious period of infrastructural expansion stimulated by subnational government promotion of internal improvements in the early 19^th century United States. It explores the political, economic, and societal processes by which people, voters, public officials, and corporations first construct, and then reconstruct systems of public finance, public administration, and political economy, and examines their long-run impacts on the constitutions, institutions, and structures of American government.