The Historiography of the Early Federal Government PDF

Here is the converted markdown format of the text in the image. # The Historiography of the Early Federal Government: Institutions,Contexts and the Imperial State **Author(s)**: Gautham Rao **Source**: *The William and Mary Quarterly*, Vol. 77, No. 1 (January 2020), pp. 97-128 **Published by**: O...

Here is the converted markdown format of the text in the image. # The Historiography of the Early Federal Government: Institutions,Contexts and the Imperial State **Author(s)**: Gautham Rao **Source**: *The William and Mary Quarterly*, Vol. 77, No. 1 (January 2020), pp. 97-128 **Published by**: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture **Stable URL**: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.1.0097 ## References Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.1.0097?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents **Note**: You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Over the past two decades, political scientists and historians of law,labor, policy, and business have produced a new historiography ofthe early U.S. federal government as part of a broader movementto bring the state "back in" to American history. These new histories ofthe early federal government focus on the institutions and policies that werecomponent parts of the early American state. By showing us the many areasin which the federal government was active in the early republic, these workschallenge the long-standing view that the U.S. federal government — andthus the American state itself — that emerged after the American Revolutionwas diminutive and, above all, weak. Early federal offices may have beensmaller and more disparate than their bureaucratized successors in industrialmodernity, but they were nonetheless important “agents of change." These scholars thus join a rising critique of Max Weber’s classic understanding thatequates the strength and significance of the state with its “monopoly of the Gautham Rao is an associate professor of history at American University and editor-in-chief of Law and History Review. He wishes to thank Lori J. Daggar, Gregory Downs, Nathaniel Drexler, Lauren Duval, Daniel Ernst, Hannah Farber, Rebecca Bren- ner Graham, Kate Haulman, Richard R. John, Alexandra Montgomery, Ariel Ron, and Karen Tani. He also wishes to thank Jessica Choppin Roney, Andrew Shankman, Peter S. Onuf, and three anonymous readers for the William and Mary Quarterly for reading and commenting on previous drafts. 1 The American state, though notoriously difficult to pin down, can be understood to be the array of public authorities from local justices of the peace through the individ- ual states' officers and the bureaus and officers of the federal government. See William J. Novak, "The Myth of the 'Weak' American State," American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72. Useful works for understanding the dimensions of the early Amer- ican state are Max M. Edling, *A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S.* *Constitution and the Making of the American State* (New York, 2003); Laura S. Jensen, "Government, the State, and Governance," *Polity* 40, no. 3 (July 2008): 379–85; Adam Sheingate, "Why Can't Americans See the State?," *Forum* 7, no. 4 (December 2009): 1–14, republished in *Revue Française de Science Politique** 61, no. 2 (2014): 15–26.* 2 Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 347–80. *William and Mary Quarterly*, 3d ser., 77, no. 1, January 2020 DOI: [https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.1.0097](https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.1.0097) legitimate use of physical force.” As William J. Novak persuasively argues, theAmerican state, though vibrant and formidable, scarcely resembled Weber’s ideal type. Studying institutions and laws “in action,” these scholars broadly agree, reveals that in the early republic strong federal institutions authority existed and acted in law, commerce, and land policy. But a richer understanding of the early federal government andAmerican state may lie beyond the history of institutions. As social theorist Pierre Bourdieu argues, it is also necessary to study ths state at its peripheries in order both to avoid regurgitating “official” histories and to recover the contingency and conflict that define the historical building.5 If the new historiography of the federal government has already illuminate what federal in the early republic, itshould now question in whose interests, and for what purposes, those institutions worked. Adopting such an approach changes our vantage point for apprehending the state. By connecting the offices of central administrationto federal officeholders on distant marchlands who put into practice statutes and edicts from the national capital, scholars can better understand the vastrange of range of the federal government’s policies and ambitions. Put differently,if historians of the federal government “face east,” to borrow DanielK. Richter’s phrasing, they might better explain how people distant from the nation's capital of different backgrounds races, and ethnicities, with varying cultural understandings of government — confronted contested, andlegitimated fedeal authority and state in the early republic. Recoveringthedtories of how citizens and subjects interacted with and shaped federalpower will new experiential dimensions to existing institutional under-standings of the early and the American state 3 Max Weber, "Politics Vocation," in From ar: Essays in ed.Mill (1946; repr., New (quotation Novak, imerican ttorical Review theoretical Timothy che Beyond Statist ndThei Review no. MarchSteinmetz, dulture: State-Formation the ultural N.Y. for Concept Wilson, Colonial mily, Gender and the ty-Century ritish Frontier," Review Do ia Document nd in diaChicago, mb Law glombert, Law and England York, 4 law action,"ee Lowa ndition the Rethinking: Genesis and Structure Bureaucratic trans. i Farage, Theory 12, Daniel East Recent scholarship on Native Americans relationship with the earlyfederal offers powerfule study of how make federal the ofthose subject topower. ve closely between peoples ations early in and nation's because dothe perspective of they perspective on authority in literature pres- entsmore than case study. 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