UC Berkeley

This dissertation puts land at the center of the American state formation to analyze the emergence of the American administrative and developmental state. As the first nation to emerge from revolt against colonial rule, in the United States empire and republicanism collided to produce a settlers’ republic. Therein, it was through the work of acquiring, surveying, and selling land; promoting infrastructure projects such as canals and railways; and managing western territories that a people wary of centralized authority paradoxically found themselves building an expansive, bureaucratized, and increasingly developmental American state. Significantly, with so much of the activity of the early American state directed towards the acquisition, settlement, and incorporation of land, territory emerged as the orienting object of government. Territory was reimagined a space to be governed—to be improved, economized, and developed in the nation’s interest. It was in pursuing settlers’ visions of an empire for liberty that early Americans found themselves building the administrative institutions and ways of relating government to territory, economy, and society now pervasive in today’s nation-states.

I make this argument in a series of studies. In the first, I construct a novel dataset characterizing antebellum Congressional debate activity from 1789 to 1861 (N=12,658), to demonstrate that the majority of early Congressional activity was concerned with acquiring, defending, and transforming land. Theorizing this centrality of land requires considering how modern state formation involved not only the expansion and bureaucratization of state administrative capacities, but also a transition from expansive empires of difference to territorially, economically, and socially contiguous nation-states. In the United States, this transition occurred via settler colonial practices of territorial incorporation such as, in the antebellum period, the integration of new states on equal political footing, and the construction of transportation and communication infrastructures.

In the second study, I examine the period in the United States before it was taken-for-granted that government should promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways to stimulate what is now called economic development. I demonstrate how the public lands—the broad swathes of land in the national domain for which title had not been transferred to private owners—were repeatedly called upon as a fiscal resource, thereby allowing early American state builders the flexibility to experiment with various institutional arrangements and new governmental rationalities to justify government support of infrastructures. Crucially, to mobilize the public lands in this way, early American state builders relied on assumptions of Native dispossession and erasure. These assumptions lowered the perceived costs of mobilizing the public lands as a fiscal resource, and institutionalized processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development.

In a third study, I analyze the legislative debates leading up to the authorization of the first transcontinental railroad as a window into how federalism complicated territorial expansion and development. I theorize federalism as the outgrowth of empire to demonstrate how federalism territorialized understandings of sovereignty, thereby rendering decisions over territorial expansion and development politically destabilizing in ways that they would not be under empire. I analyze the debates leading up to the passage of the 1862 Pacific Railway Act to examine how federalism complicated territorial development in practice. The fact that the railroad could not be approved until after the outbreak of the Civil War, which removed Southern sectional interests from Congress, illustrates the limitations of federalist systems to make decisions over land. Because federalism allows legislators to sidestep conflict by excluding dissenting positions via the re-drawing or strategic selection of political boundaries, federalism does not incentivize meaningful compromise over questions of territorial development.

I conclude by sketching the evolution of the United States’ settler political economy. I discuss how the various efforts to manage land examined in detail above were situated in the United States’ evolving land policy, administrative capacities, and governmental rationalities. From the General Land Office to the Department of Interior, it was to meet the demands of managing vast territories that some of the United States’ earliest and most technocratic administrative agencies were established. And it was from the bird’s eye view of those agencies that early American state builders experimented with ways of promoting and optimizing public welfare using land policy that echo the economizing reasoning of today.

Analyzing the United States as a settlers’ republic makes visible the trade-offs and exclusions constitutive of American state formation and establishes the central role that land played in American political and economic development. By doing so, this dissertation points to the horizon needing to be transformed therein to perfect democratic government and reimagine relationships between land, government, and people more generally.