“The Power Which Holds the Purse Strings Absolutely Must Rule”: Financiers, Private Property, and the State 1750-1800

Abstract

Political theorists generally ascribe to the state a decisive role in the formation and protection of property rights, a view especially prevalent in the historiography of financial property in the United States. Given the capacities of government at the American Founding, however, such accounts are implausible. Drawing on writings composed by the engineers of American banking and governance, my project reconstructs an alternative hypothesis: Financial property rights are a product of norms, ideologies, and representations managed by non-state actors. That hypothesis, I argue, prompts us to reconsider the relationship between resource allocation and government accountability.