Uneven Development and the History of U.S. Capitalism

Emma Teitelman, Cornell University

The decentralized, federated nature of U.S. state authority has seemingly endless consequences for the nature of power relations and structures of political economy in the United States. This project asks: how has federalism shaped the political development of social classes and their political activity in US history? What has federalism meant for the articulation of working-class power? As a starting point, I begin in the late-nineteenth century, when patterns of uneven economic development and the politics of federalism intersected to produce contradictory class coalitions. As northeastern capital found new outlets in undeveloped resources of the South and the West, it contributed to new forms of regionalism: because long-distance investment produced inequality across space, it provoked political conflicts that were articulated in spatial terms. These conflicts revolved around problems of scale, jurisdiction, and communities of interest in order to contest the unsettled relationships between space, class, and state. In this context, I explore political efforts to use sub-national institutions to discipline faraway investors, and shed light on the politics of localism more broadly.

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 Presented in Session 21. Critical Perspectives on US History