National duties : custom houses and the making of the American state / Gautham Rao.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rao, Gautham, Author.

Series:

American beginnings, 1500-1900.

American Beginnings, 1500-1900

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Customs administration--United States.

Customs administration.

Customs administration--England--Colonies--America.

United States--History--1783-1815.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the wake of the American Revolution, if you had asked a citizen whether his fledgling state would survive more than two centuries, the answer would have been far from confident. The problem, as is so often the case, was money. Left millions of dollars of debt by the war, the nascent federal government created a system of taxes on imported goods and installed custom houses at the nation's ports, which were charged with collecting these fees. Gradually, the houses amassed enough revenue from import merchants to stabilize the new government. But, as the fragile United States was dependent on this same revenue, the merchants at the same time gained outsized influence over the daily affairs of the custom houses. As the United States tried to police this commerce in the early nineteenth century, the merchants' stranglehold on custom house governance proved to be formidable. In National Duties, Gautham Rao makes the case that the origins of the federal government and the modern American state lie in these conflicts at government custom houses between the American Revolution and the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues that the contours of the government emerged from the push-and-pull between these groups, with commercial interests gradually losing power to the administrative state, which only continued to grow and lives on today.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Archival Sources

Introduction

1. Custom Houses, Negotiated Authority, and the Bonds of Empire, 1714- 1776

2. Political Economy and the Making of the Customs System

3. Negotiating Authority in Federalist America, 1789- 1800

4. Commerce or War?

5. Jefferson's Embargo and the Era of Commercial Restrictions, 1807- 1815

6. Dismantling Discretion, 1816- 1828

Epilogue: Charleston, 1832

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

0-226-36710-X

OCLC:

946887835