| My dissertation explores the political economies of two small cities in different regions of the early American republic in comparative perspective between 1783 and the 1830s: New Haven, Connecticut in New England and Wilmington, Delaware in the Mid-Atlantic. During those critical years, the United States developed from a set of newly independent states beginning to build a political economy, to an expanded federal union with a state-directed market economy. While no city is representative of a whole region, especially its largely rural mass in this era, these two examples offer a perspective on the diversity of state and local political economies and the public reflections on them. I am examining topical areas, including agriculture and rural life, manufactures, commerce, internal improvements, and banking, not as a set of independent local concerns, but as local discourses in tension with each other and with the overall development of each region's political economy.;This study explores the public and private discourses of primarily local and regional actors who shaped their political economies as they intersected with the national plane of economic, political, and cultural changes. This focus will help to reveal much about the manner in which notable historical events or processes such as diplomatic treaties, international commercial interruption, interstate canal projects, creation of a national bank, or transnational wars redounded at local levels, and the ways in which local discourses reverberated upward to shape discourses and policy at regional and national levels. Close examination of the political economies of cities such as New Haven and Wilmington reveals that simple categorizations of Republican and Federalist, Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian, New Englander, or American easily dissolve. The multivalent identities of citizens of the early republic were constantly shifting in response to or in support of local, state, regional, and national policy decisions. A closer examination of these processes in the early republic's smaller "urban crucibles" will go far in showing the degree to which national identity formation---if one did in fact, form---hinged upon the shifting interestedness of individual economic actors who participated in political economic discourse from their local experiences. It is not only in their roles as commercial centers that these "micropoles" are important venues of intertwined local, regional, and national interests in this study. The varying degrees of these cities' involvement in manufacturing and internal improvement projects, different agricultural products and methods of production, and the financial networks which arose during this era, also show patterns of interconnectedness among economic interests, public discourse, and policy making. |
