A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867
Max M. Edling
Abstract
A Hercules in the Cradle traces the evolution of United States central state capacity in the sphere of fiscal policy and public finance. It demonstrates how within merely a few years after independence, the United States acquired the capacity to raise revenue through taxation and government borrowing. The new nation used this capacity to finance wars and territorial expansion that made the United States the predominant power on the North American Continent. In the first half of the book the creation of a productive fiscal regime and a well-managed public debt, made possibly by the framing and ... More
Keywords: the Civil War, federal government, fiscal regime, Mexican War, public finance, taxation, territorial expansion, United States, war finance, War of 1812
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 | Print ISBN-13: 9780226181578 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2015 | DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226181608.001.0001 |
