Shaping the Economy Through Public Debt: Statebuilding in Industrializing America

Abstract

The nineteenth-century U.S. state is often understood as a non-administrative state that purposefully shied away from intervening in the economy. This essay looks at the public debt amassed during the Civil War to explore how this instrument of finance and statecraft could be used to reshape the state and make it into an influential economic player without developing a large bureaucracy. Public debt served to build and maintain the financial infrastructure that would underpin the massive capitalist-industrial development of the United States in the half-century that followed the Civil War.