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PATRIMONIAL CAPITALISM
AND EMPIRE
POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL
THEORY
Series Editor: Julian Go
Recent Volumes:
Volume 5: 1985
Volume 6: 1987
Volume 7: 1989
Volume 8: 1994
Volume 9: 1995
Volume 10: 1996
Volume 11: 1997
Volume 12: 1998
Volume 13: 1999
Volume 14: 2000
Volume 15: 2002
Volume 16: 2004
Volume 17: 2005
Volume 18: 2006
Volume 19: 2008
Volume 20: 2009
Volume 21: 2010
Volume 22: Rethinking Obama: 2011
Volume 23: 2012
Volume 24: Postcolonial Sociology: 2013
Volume 25: Decentering Social Theory: 2013
Volume 26: The United States in Decline: 2014
Volume 27: Fields of Knowledge: Science, Politics and Publics in the Neoliberal
Age: 2014
POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 28

PATRIMONIAL
CAPITALISM
AND EMPIRE
EDITED BY

MOUNIRA M. CHARRAD
Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin,
Austin, TX, USA

JULIA ADAMS
Department of Sociology, Yale University,
New Haven, CT, USA

United Kingdom North America Japan

India Malaysia China
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2015

Copyright r 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence
permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency
and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the
chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the
quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or
otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties,
express or implied, to their use.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78441-758-1
ISSN: 0198-8719 (Series)

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awarded to Emerald
for adherence to
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ISO 14001:2004.

Certificate Number 1985

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CONTENTS

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS vii

SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD ix

STUDENT EDITORIAL BOARD xi

EDITORIAL STATEMENT xiii

SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION xv

INTRODUCTION: OLD (PATRIMONIAL) POLITICAL

FORMS MADE NEW
Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad 1

PATRIMONIALISM IN AMERICA: THE PUBLIC

DOMAIN IN THE MAKING OF MODERNITY FROM
COLONIAL TIMES TO THE LATE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
John R. Hall 7

EXPLAINING THE GREAT CONTINUITY: ETHNIC

INSTITUTIONS, COLONIALISM, AND SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT IN SPANISH AMERICA
James Mahoney 43

LIMITS OF EMPIRE: THE FRENCH COLONIAL STATE

AND LOCAL PATRIMONIALISM IN NORTH AFRICA
Mounira M. Charrad and Daniel Jaster 63

v
vi CONTENTS

PATRIMONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, AND

COLONIALISM AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
UNDER DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY RULE,
C.1652 1795
Kerry Ward 91

GRANDPA STATE INSTEAD OF BOURGEOIS STATE:

PATRIMONIAL POLITICS IN CHINA’S AGE OF
COMMERCE, 1644 1839
Ho-fung Hung 115

ANTIPODEAN PATRIMONIALISM? SQUATTOCRACY,

DEMOCRACY AND LAND RIGHTS IN AUSTRALIA
Pavla Miller 137

COLONIALISM, NEOPATRIMONIALISM, AND

HYBRID STATE FORMATION IN MALAYSIA AND
THE PHILIPPINES
Daniel P. S. Goh 165

PATRIMONIALISM, BUREAUCRATIZATION, AND

FISCAL SYSTEMS OF BRITISH BENGAL, 1765 1819
Malik Martin 191

INNOVATIONS IN TRUST: PATRIMONIAL AND

BUREAUCRATIC AUTHORITY IN THE ASANTE
EMPIRE OF WEST AFRICA
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber 217

LOCATING THE ‘FAMILY-STATE’: THE FORGOTTEN

LEGACY OF JAVANESE THEORIES OF THE PUBLIC
DOMAIN (17TH 20TH C.)
Romain Bertrand 241

CODA

SOVEREIGNTY AND SOCIOLOGY: FROM STATE

THEORY TO THEORIES OF EMPIRE
Julia Adams and George Steinmetz 269
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Julia Adams Department of Sociology, Yale University,

New Haven, CT, USA
Romain Bertrand Center for International Research and
Studies (CERI), Sciences Po, Paris, France
Mounira M. Charrad Department of Sociology, University of
Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
Daniel P. S. Goh Department of Sociology, National
University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
John R. Hall Department of Sociology, University of
California-Davis, Davis, CA, USA
Ho-fung Hung Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Daniel Jaster Department of Sociology, University of
Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
James Mahoney Department of Sociology and Political
Science, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL, USA
Nicolette D. Department of Sociology, University of
Manglos-Weber Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Malik Martin Attorney, Rueter Scargall Bennett LLP,
Ontario, Canada
Pavla Miller School of Global, Urban and Social
Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne,
Australia

vii
viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

George Steinmetz Sociology Department University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Kerry Ward History Department, Rice University,
Houston, TX, USA
SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD

Ronald Aminzade Howard Kimeldorf

University of Minnesota University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Florencia Mallon

Duke University University of Wisconsin-Madison

Michael Burawoy Jill Quadagno

University of California-Berkeley Florida State University

Nitsan Chorev Ian Roxborough

Brown University Stony Brook University

John Coatsworth Michael Schwartz

Columbia University Stony Brook University

Diane E. Davis George Steinmetz

Harvard University University of Michigan

Susan Eckstein John D. Stephens

Boston University University of North Carolina-
Chapel Hill
Peter Evans
University of California-Berkeley Maurice Zeitlin
University of California-Los
Nora Hamilton Angeles
University of Southern California
Sharon Zukin
Eiko Ikegami City University of New York
New School University Graduate
Faculty

ix
This page intentionally left blank
STUDENT EDITORIAL BOARD

Cara Bowman

Zophia Edwards

David Levy

Megan O’Leary

xi
This page intentionally left blank
EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Political Power and Social Theory is a peer-reviewed annual journal

committed to advancing the interdisciplinary understanding of the linkages
between political power, social relations, and historical development. The
journal welcomes both empirical and theoretical work and is willing to
consider papers of substantial length. Publication decisions are made by the
editor in consultation with members of the editorial board and anonymous
reviewers. For information on submissions, please see the journal website
at www.bu.edu/sociology/ppst.

xiii
This page intentionally left blank
SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

I am delighted to present this special volume of PPST, Patrimonial

Capitalism and Empire, edited by Mounira M. Charrad and Julia Adams.
Thanks to Mounira and Julia for choosing PPST and to the contributors
for their insightful essays. I am also thankful to Thomas Dark and the rest
of the team at Emerald for putting it all together.

Julian Go
November 2014
Boston, MA

xv
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION: OLD
(PATRIMONIAL) POLITICAL
FORMS MADE NEW

Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad

Scholarly and popular interest in empire has expanded dramatically in

recent years. Some scholars seek fresh ways of understanding the evolution
and dispersion of a form of power much older than the modern nation
state. Others see empire, not long ago assumed to be a mode of governance
on the way out, as having a surprising new lease on life. And many wonder
about the implications for today’s world and the future roles of imperial
powers, their dependencies and antagonists.
This volume engages directly with these preoccupations and affiliated
debates, and in an original and we hope instructive way. First, the volume
foregrounds social theory especially the continuing vitality of the legacy
of Max Weber as a tool with which to interpret the historical and global
range of imperial politics and colonial state formation. Weber developed
the concept of patrimonialism (1922/1978, 1997) which he often con-
trasted with rational-legal bureaucracy to explore political systems in
which rulers exert power on the basis of family and kinship ties, patron-
client relations and chains of personal allegiances, with few formal rules
and regulations. All the authors who have contributed to this volume find
Weber’s concept useful, an illuminating if imperfect guide to imperial

Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire

Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 28, 1 5
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920150000028027
1
2 JULIA ADAMS AND MOUNIRA M. CHARRAD

and colonial politics in multiple, increasingly interconnected, parts of the

world.
But the relationship of patrimonial politics and its imperial extensions to
modernity is also a tense and puzzling one. Why are such political forms,
which many would consign to a distant past, so tenacious, even resurgent
in the current global political economy? How does modern capitalism
which emerges painfully out of the crucible of patrimonial states and
empires become, once again, a patrimonial formation? The shift from
patrimonial capitalism to a more open form of capitalist economy and then
back again resonates with Piketty’s (2014) influential characterization of
the past century, issuing in rising wealth and income inequality, but for rea-
sons that remain unclear. In capitalist systems based on private property
and freedom of contract, built on agents who relate to one another within
markets from a stance of formal legal equality, political mechanisms
and struggles for power at the upper reaches of the economy are important,
albeit still mysterious in their workings.
This volume describes and explores this shadowy set of conjunctions,
focusing on the interconnected themes of colonialism and empire; patri-
monialism; power and sovereignty; and capitalism. These unruly social
forms, and the concepts themselves, are not readily contained within the
spatial boundaries of the nation-state or its historical heyday, which
extended from the mid-19th until the mid-20th centuries. Until recently,
therefore, modern social scientists in particular, largely bound by the
canons of methodological nationalism, were unlikely to investigate them
in their fullness (see the concluding essay in this volume by Julia Adams
and George Steinmetz). Social science historians and historical social
scientists are now breaking free of these limits. This volume is an example:
the 12 papers in the collection theoretically ambitious and historically
rich embrace half a millennium and range over Europe, the
Middle East, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas, and their
interconnections.
Some of the key questions that the papers collectively address are: What
are the implications of foregrounding patrimonialism as a tool for analyz-
ing the dynamics of colonialism and empire? How do patrimonial politics
work, and how do we productively expand upon Max Weber’s contribu-
tions, with an eye to the present and future of capitalist modernity? How
do the hierarchical relations of sovereignty characteristic of patrimonial
empires shape the uneasily post-imperial fortunes of states, including not
simply the “usual suspects” but also regions and countries like Malaysia
Introduction: Old (Patrimonial) Political Forms Made New 3

and the Philippines (Daniel P.S. Goh), West Africa (Nicolette D. Manglos-
Weber) or the United States (John R. Hall; Julia Adams and George
Steinmetz)? Can the lens of patrimonialism better help us understand the
strategies of colonial states, for example the French imperial political
project in Algeria and Tunisia (Mounira M. Charrad and Daniel Jaster)?
Elite family/household/kin relations form the spine of such states and
empires; what impact did patrimonial practices and institutions have in
spaces as diverse as Java (Romain Bertrand); British India (Malik Martin),
or Spanish America (James Mahoney)? What does patrimonial capitalism
look like not just in the West but, for example, with respect to the Chinese
Age of Commerce (Ho-fung Hung)?
Along with its partner Annals collection Patrimonial Power in the
Modern World (Adams & Charrad, 2011), this volume originally developed
out of a 2008 conference at Yale University on “Lineages of Patrimonial
Politics, Then and Now.” The interdisciplinary conference was built on a
common set of theoretical questions and a wide variety of historical and
area expertise. Participating scholars came from the fields of sociology,
history, political science, anthropology, and global studies, with the intel-
lectual center of gravity lodged in historical sociology and social science
history.
In this volume, which is directly focused on colonialism and empire,
some essays call attention to special repertoires of strategies and social rela-
tions among imperial power holders, or between them and other social and
economic actors. Others focus on informal arrangements among social and
economic actors that often emerge when imperial structures break down or
recede. Groups founded on personal relationships of solidarity can congeal
around resources that an empire or state cannot provide or control. What
then? Is this a source of stability or instability and under what circum-
stances? And what of the tensions among those scaling the ladders of
empire, the families that often placed their feet on the rungs, and the nature
of the positions themselves? They matter for the empires themselves, as
these essays show, as well as the people who staff them, interact with them,
or are ruled by them.
Considering the patrimonial kernel of empire on the one hand, and the
colonial constitution of many modern-day states on the other, also opens
up new avenues in social and political theory. It enables scholars to see
varieties of rational-legal political economy in a new and more accurate
way by bringing to the fore the patrimonial aspects that are inherited or
that develop beneath and alongside formal politico-economic structures. In
4 JULIA ADAMS AND MOUNIRA M. CHARRAD

some cases, including Brazil, the United States (John R. Hall), Australia
(Pavla Miller), and South Africa (Kerry Ward), these dynamics have privi-
leged certain family-household forms and racial hierarchies, with long-term
implications for the character of development of land accumulation and
capitalist property rights.
Much work remains to be done in this regard, essential to dispelling the
clouds that surround the ongoing histories of patrimonial power and elite
closure in contemporary capitalism. How those relations map onto today’s
democratic, bureaucratic sovereign state styles and networks of interna-
tional world governance, for example, and what the practical policy lega-
cies of patrimonial empires might be, are crucial issues. That the authors
find these and other key questions important but do not necessarily agree
on the answers is a necessary feature of an evolving set of interrelated
inquiries that have only become more pressing in recent years. The continu-
ing inflation including in the United States of the role of the charis-
matic political executive; the growing dispersion of federated forms of
sovereign power, and popular struggles for representation and voice in
capitalist democracy, cannot be understood without reference to patrimo-
nial capitalism and empire.
Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire raises questions that are not only
timely but also critical to a better understanding of politics in our troubled,
globalizing and, perhaps someday, post-patrimonial capitalist and post-
imperial world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

At Yale University, our grateful thanks are due to the Whitney and Betty
MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; the Center for
Comparative Research, and the Office of the Provost, for financial and
organizational support. We also thank Pam Colesworthy, Jerri Cummings,
and Taly Noam for their work on behalf of the originating conference.
At the University of Texas-Austin, we wish to recognize the support of the
Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts, and the help rendered by
Michael Brenner, Jennifer Martinez, and E. J. Sanders. Finally, we greatly
appreciate all that Julian Go, editor of Political Power and Social Theory,
and the Emerald staff have done to make this volume possible.
Introduction: Old (Patrimonial) Political Forms Made New 5

REFERENCES

Adams, J., & Charrad, M. M. (Eds.). (2011, July). Patrimonial power in the modern world
(Vol. 636). The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
New York, NY: Sage.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge:
Belknap Press.
Weber, M. (1922/1978). Economy and society. G. Roth & C. Wittich (Eds.), An outline of
interpretive sociology. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Weber, M. (1997). In T. Parsons (Ed.), The theory of social and economic organization.
New York, NY: Free Press.
This page intentionally left blank
PATRIMONIALISM IN AMERICA:
THE PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE
MAKING OF MODERNITY FROM
COLONIAL TIMES TO THE LATE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

John R. Hall

ABSTRACT
To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements
ever advance the “modern” economy, this essay examines emergent state
institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of pub-
lic lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I decon-
struct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements logic,
setting, obligations, and resources in order to show how state grants of
land to individuals and corporations (notably railroad companies) con-
stituted patrimonial practices embedded within modern structures.
“Modern state patrimonialism” had its origins in royal patrimonialism.
Monopolization of resources by a state rather than an absolutist
ruler continued to offer the basis for patrimonial practice, but state
patrimonial resource distribution became less personalistic and more

Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire

Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 28, 7 41
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-871920150000028001
7
8 JOHN R. HALL

connected to public goals (financing the state, rewarding state service,

settlement of territory, development of a national economy, and con-
struction of a transportation system). Recipients of patrimonial distribu-
tions often gained considerable control over disposition of resources that
they received. In these patrimonialist practices, economic action was con-
structed in logics of action that occurred outside of “market” transac-
tions. Future research should analyze patrimonial dynamics during the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by identifying state monopolizations
of scarce and desirable resources (mineral rights; city water systems;
electrical systems; telephone systems; radio, television, and other airwave
bandwidth; the internet), and analyzing how the distribution of those
resources are entailed, controlled, licensed, or otherwise managed. A
research program in the study of modern patrimonialism helps build out
an institutionalist sociology of the economy.
Keywords: Patrimonialism; Max Weber; modernity; land; railroads;
United States

Under the sign of modernity, diverse social practices seem to swirl amongst
one another in ways that render problematic any effort to establish a neat
demarcation between what is modern and what, not. Patrimonialism is a
case in point. In this study, I trace government land-distribution policies in
what became the United States from colonial times to the end of the nine-
teenth century in order to show how the core logic of patrimonialism could
be transformed in ways that became congruent with emergent modern eco-
nomic and political institutions.
In Max Weber’s basic definition, patrimonialism involves a family-like
set of reciprocal social obligations between a powerholder controlling
resources and dependents, subjects, or other parties seeking benefit from
those resources. As Weber recognized, patrimonialism did not simply dis-
appear with the early-modern emergence of increasingly rationalized social
forms. In this vein, Roth (1971/1968, pp. 158, 160) has demonstrated the
relevance of a web of Weberian patrimonialist concepts to analysis of con-
temporary social formations. He emphasizes that “personal rulership trans-
cends the dichotomy of tradition and modernity” and is “an ineradicable
component of the public and private bureaucracies of highly institutiona-
lized countries.”
Patrimonialism in America 9

Roth’s point notwithstanding, in the decades since his study, a sub-

stantial amount of the research on patrimonialism has remained focused
on the study of ancient, medieval, and early-modern social formations.
As for research on patrimonialism in modern societies, the most robust
lines of analysis have concentrated on issues of economic development
(Schlumberger, 2008) and non-Western nation-states (e.g., Charrad, 2011;
Ikpe, 2009; Kiser & Sacks, 2011; Tavolaro, 2008), for which a concept of
“neo-patrimonialism” sometimes has been deployed (Erdmann & Engel,
2007) and critiqued (Bach, 2011; Woods, 2012). In studies of relatively
developed societies, other than Schwartz’s (2012) study of sovereign
wealth funds, little research concerning modern institutions of bureau-
cracy in relation to political economy explicitly analyzes patrimonialist
logics, other than in societies of the former Soviet bloc (Hanson, 2011;
Hensell, 2012) or in personalistic politics and autonomous mafia-like
power complexes (e.g., Biggart, 1984; Collins, 2011; Eisenstadt &
Roniger, 1984, pp. 155 57; Hamilton & Biggart, 1984). Economists and
economic sociologists who study resource mobilization and reciprocal
transactions along alliance network channels complexes that might rea-
sonably be theorized in relation to patrimonial models tend either to
invoke patrimonialism only in passing (e.g., Granovetter’s, 1994 review of
research on business groups), or they employ variables describing net-
works and markets that converge on characterizing patrimonialist situa-
tions, but without explicitly employing patrimonialist concepts (e.g., Burt,
1993; Lamoreaux, 1994; Perrow, 1993).
In short, we have not yet fully emerged from the shadows of the holistic
and dichotomous social theories of modernity that Roth already challenged
in the 1970s: scholarship has tended to construe patrimonialism as
antithetical to rational, calculative, and universalistic principles of modern
political economy. On this account, to examine whether and how patrimo-
nial logics shaped the emergence and trajectories of political-economic
institutions in the modern world as other than mere remnants or personal
appropriations of public resources would amount to study of a “negative
case” here, one in which the processes and outcomes were at odds with
conventional scholarly expectations (Emigh, 1997). In relation to the
conventional thesis that modern economies become centered in capitalist
marketplace transactions (embedded, to be sure), if, even in the nineteenth
century, the emergent “modern” American economic dynamics of develop-
ment centered on distribution of public lands are found to have patrimonial
features central to their structuration, such a finding would underscore the
importance of further investigating phenomena that have received short
10 JOHN R. HALL

shrift to date the patrimonial aspects of the structuration of modern eco-

nomic institutions.
Two sensitizing orientations offer a basis on which to proceed. First, it
is important to recognize that a tremendously wide range of patrimonial
arrangements has obtained historically. Second, we need to entertain the
empirical possibility that political-economic formations of modern and
postmodern societies may entail quasi-patrimonial features. Both these
orientations already are foreshadowed by Weber’s historical sociology of
patrimonialism in relation to patriarchy, feudalism, the state, military
power, and capitalism (2013/1922, pp. 1006 1069, 1088 1109).
Weber began by delineating patrimonialism as the social logic of patriar-
chy when it is extended beyond the immediate household. However, this con-
ceptualization follows Weber’s more general logic of inquiry, which
constructs batteries of concepts as case-comparative theoretical models
(i.e., ideal types). Rather than pigeonholing empirical cases as “fitting” ideal
types, Weber’s methodology involves analysis of empirical cases by consider-
ing the degree to which they approximate one or more theoretically defined
“cases” that is, ideal types and examining the specific ways in which they
differ from various other theoretically defined types or subtypes. Overall,
Weber’s methodology anticipates social complexity and facilitates the analysis
of hybrid cases possessing a mix of features that derive from alternative logics
subject to theoretical description via ideal types (Hall, 1999).
For the analysis of patrimonialism, Weber’s approach facilitates under-
standing relationships of power and reciprocity that obtain under a wide
range of conditions that extend outward from direct kinship to begin
with, fictive kinship, and beyond that, conditions that mirror kin obliga-
tions even in the absence of fictive assertions. The possibilities that Weber
detailed are striking. First, he showed how states may be organized along
patrimonial lines, and that when they are, patrimonialist principles may
extend beyond the limits of personalized social relationships to the entire
territory for which the state claims to monopolize power (2013/1922,
pp. 1013 1044). Second, Weber recognized the most diverse relationships
of patrimonialist state complexes to capitalism, including such possibilities
as state capitalist monopolies, state licensing of rights to capitalist income
opportunities, and state facilitation of “politically privileged” and “private
capitalism” (2013/1922, pp. 1090 1104). Third, although Weber did not
spell it out, Adams (2005) has shown that familial capitalism may develop
in relation to logics of state patrimonialism.
Given that patrimonialist features find their ways into wide-ranging
social situations, it is thus important not to essentialize patrimonialism as a
Patrimonialism in America 11

decisively bounded social “thing.” However, we must also be clear about

the core features of patrimonialism so as to be able to analyze the patrimo-
nialist character of diverse social phenomena under modern conditions,
beyond the boundaries where its salience is conventionally assumed.
In order to do so, it is helpful to distinguish between the logic of
patrimonialism, its setting, the substance of patrimonial obligations, and
the resources in which patrimonial relationships traffic.
Weber in effect initiated such an approach when he identified the logic of
patrimonialism in familial relationships, but shifted the analysis outside any
necessary setting of the family per se. In this account, the patrimonial power-
holder controls resources the patrimony and continues to have a family-
like obligation to provide for dependents, as well as a self-interest in doing so
in order to sustain the patrimonial domain. Dependents those who receive
resources in turn have an extra-legal quasi-familial obligation to serve the
interests of the patrimonial ruler, which in effect can extend to the interests
of the “privileged group” of those within the patrimonial domain as a whole
(Weber, 2013/1922, pp. 1010 1012). In its core logic, then, patrimonialism
does not have to do with family ties but with distributions of sought-after
resources that are reciprocally tied to family-like dependency and in-group
obligations. In the strongest patrimonial circumstances, relationships become
shaped into a community of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. These ideal-
typical features, as Weber emphasized more generally, are seldom completely
realized, within families or outside them. Yet even in the absence of trust and
solidarity, patrimonial dynamics may obtain when assets or rights are mono-
polized (i.e., as patrimonial resources), and the monopoly holder distributes
such assets or rights to a recipient who can exploit them, but makes distribu-
tion contingent on the recipient’s commitment to fulfillment of specified obli-
gations. The nature of both the resources subjected to patrimonialist
monopolization and contingent distribution, as well as the obligations, are
highly variable in their contents (Weber, 2013/1922, pp. 235 236). Here,
with little conceptual effort, we can imagine theoretical transitions to certain
types of formal modern contracts and to the chartering of corporations, a
point to which I return below.
Theorizing patrimonialism in such terms suggests various possible trajec-
tories of hybridic recomposition. In one, to be pursued here, family-like
dependence would fall away, and the terms of obligation would shift sub-
stantially, while remaining connected to the basic patrimonial logic of
resource monopolization and contingent distribution. Other possibilities
include rapprochement between a state bureaucracy and patrimonial
forces, found by Wang and Adams (2011) in Qing China in ways that
12 JOHN R. HALL

parallel the ancien re´gime in France, and the persistence of patrimonial

power through the control of expertise in the rise of the modern state, iden-
tified in the case of France by Mukerji (2011). As Roth argued, we have
every reason to expect that such possibilities both persist and emerge anew
in modern societies, and not just under the conditions of corruption or
crime syndicates that the stereotypes suggest.
It is therefore important to reject the (often implicit) assumption that
patrimonialism is an archaic social phenomenon, and thus, in modernity, a
remnant or survival, and either a corruption of or an obstacle to posited
“rational” modern economic arrangements (i.e., the supposedly free mar-
ket). Certainly, at various junctures in Economy and Society, Weber (2013/
1922, p. 1091, pp. 1094 1095) supported such an assumption, by pointing
to the unstable conditions generated by patrimonialism as being antitheti-
cal to the conditions of predictability and rationalization favored by capi-
talists. Yet in the course of his discussions, Weber (2013/1922, p. 1095) also
acknowledged a variety of complex relationships between patrimonialism
and capitalism. On the one hand, he noted that certain forms of capitalism,
notably industrial capitalism based on fixed capital investments “must be
able to count on the continuity, trustworthiness and objectivity of the legal
order, and on the rational, predictable functioning of legal and administra-
tive agencies.” On the other hand, Weber recognized possibilities of “patri-
monial capitalism” and held that wholesale and trade capitalism were less
influenced by operation under patrimonial conditions. In short, Weber’s
discussion should define a research agenda in which the variety of possible
articulations of patrimonialism with various kinds of economic activity is
to be further explored. It is intellectually insupportable to assert any hard
division between patrimonialism and capitalism based on the arbitrary
capriciousness of patrimonial relationships.
Such an assumption may be fruitfully displaced by exploring whether
and how patrimonialism may operate in ways that facilitate the emergence
and expansions of modern capitalist political economies. Rather than pre-
suming patrimonialism to be an obstacle, the task is to ask to what degree
and how patrimonial practices have articulated with other social forms in
modern political economies an agenda that recently has gained traction
(Lachmann, 2011). In wider theoretical terms, addressing this issue holds
out the promise of retheorizing modernity as a complex of heterogeneous
and differently ordered fields (Hall, 2009a, 2009b), rather than the teleolo-
gically emergent relatively coherent holistic social formation described in
diverse modern social theories of the twentieth century, from those of
Marxists to Talcott Parsons.
Patrimonialism in America 13

In order to address the issue of whether patrimonialism helped to

“make” modernity, here, I examine emergent institutional practices in rela-
tion to the domain of public lands from colonial times in North America to
the late nineteenth-century U.S., to determine whether these practices con-
stituted a channel through which aspects of patrimonial practice became
embedded within modern structures, yielding practices amounting to “mod-
ern state patrimonialism.” There was such a development of patrimonial-
ism, I intend to show, and it had its origins in earlier royal forms of
patrimonialism that involved direct extension of familial patrimonialism to
the entire range of resources and territories claimed by a throne. In modern
state patrimonialism, monopolization of resources by a state rather than
an absolutist ruler continues to offer the basis for patrimonial practice,
but the state purposes of patrimonial resource distribution become less per-
sonalistic and more connected to public goals of state, the nexus of distri-
bution and obligation becomes increasingly rationalized and formalized,
and recipients of patrimonial distributions, so long as they fulfill obliga-
tions, often gain considerable latitude concerning further disposition of
resources that they receive.

PATRIMONIALISM IN NORTH AMERICA

The United States with a republican state, democratic impulses, vast

resources relative to population, and streams of people coming from the Old
World might seem like a virtual “negative case” laboratory for exploring
modern state patrimonialism. Relative to Europe, this is no doubt true.
Certainly we will not find the patrimonial claim supposedly asserted by
Louis XIV of France, “L’état, c’est moi.” For Europe, this absolutism fig-
ured strongly in emergent mercantilism as a basis of “patrimonial capitalism”
(Weber, 2013/1922, pp. 1097 1099). Indeed, Arno Mayer has put forward
the bold proposition that the old regime never really disappeared in Europe
(1981; cf. Gerhard, 1981). Rather, the nobility used absolutism as a vehicle of
status-group power that maintained its advantageous position by mastering
the emerging opportunities of capitalist activity. Europe, then, would not be
the best venue in which to study modern state patrimonialism, for patrimo-
nial arrangements already were well established there before the industrial
revolution, and it would not be straightforward to interpret persistence as
development toward modern state patrimonialism rather than archaic impe-
diment or corruption of modern economic practices.
14 JOHN R. HALL

In what became the United States, it might seem reasonable to assume

that a republican state would be antithetical to patrimonialism. In ideal-
typical terms, we should conceptualize the republican state as antagonistic
to dispensation of monopolized resources on the basis of personalistic ties
and obligations. However, the United States state, at any point in its his-
tory, cannot be construed as neatly fitting an ideal-typical model of republi-
canism. Shedding quasi-ideological assumptions about the character of the
American political economy is a first step toward an empirical analysis of
American state formation. Anticipating the present analysis’s conclusions,
we may expect to find a hybrid of market and other economic practices
and republican and other political forms.
Many social institutions, slavery foremost among them, were brought
from the Old World to the New prior to American independence.
Patrimonialism migrated as well. As Kaufman (2009) points out, the thir-
teen original American colonies counted diverse patterns of settlement,
including patrimonial ones, for example, in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Moreover, the modern state is a bit of a Hydra, with so many complex
endeavors that overall patterns of state formation may mask domains in
which state patrimonialist dynamics obtain. For these reasons, we cannot
simply assume a blank slate in the United States relative to European influ-
ences, nor on the other hand, should we expect to characterize it in any
essentialist way as patrimonial.
To zero in on modern state patrimonialism here, I analyze a relatively
bounded domain of activity involving the state and other economic actors.
Methodologically, I emulate the strategy of a Marxist friend who once
commented that the way to reveal the workings of society is to “follow the
money,” but with one amendment: I intend to “follow the patrimony,” that
is, monopolized resources that are distributed under terms of reciprocal
obligation. In the United States through the end of the nineteenth century,
the most obvious and sought after patrimony is land, specifically, the fed-
eral state’s public domain of lands and the resources those lands contained.
From colonial times to the end of the nineteenth century, significant por-
tions of the land patrimony of what became the federal government in the
United States found their ways into private hands. In tracing these distribu-
tions in a focused way, I seek to identify whether and what patrimonial
processes were at work, and how relative to historical antecedents
they became shaped and transformed in ways that took more modern
forms. I thus explore whether patrimonial arrangements arrangements
that are not conventionally acknowledged to be modern ever
advance the “modern” economy. My guiding questions are simple: is
Patrimonialism in America 15

patrimonialism truly “other” in relation to the political economy of the

United States? If not, in what ways can processes of political economy be
said to entail patrimonial dynamics, and with what consequences?
There can be no doubt but that the quest for land is a central channel of
American history. And whatever the processes, the resulting distribution in
the United States is tremendously skewed. In the 1980s, estimates had 70%
of the population living on 2% of the land, with some 60% of land in pri-
vate hands. Of land held privately, ownership was about as unequal as it
was on average worldwide: 5% of U.S. owners held 75% of land, and at
the other end of the scale, 78% of owners possessed 3%. These distribu-
tions would be even more skewed if the population as a whole, rather than
just landowners, were included (Geisler, 1984, pp. 7 8).
The overall distribution of land can be regarded as the outcome of com-
plex processes of state land acquisition, distribution, sale, and resale. I will
not dwell here on state acquisition, but obviously, Native Americans were
almost completely expropriated of the lands they occupied and used, by a
variety of actions ranging from purchase and (sometimes coerced) treaty to
war and forced expulsion. Before the Revolutionary War, the thirteen colo-
nies made sweeping land claims some of them extending “to the South
Sea,” meaning the Pacific Ocean. After the Revolutionary War, the public
domain of the federal government came to be assembled out of confisca-
tions from Tories, cessions of western lands by the original thirteen states,
and then, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the annexation of the Republic
of Texas in 1845, the treaty with Great Britain for Oregon in 1846, the
Mexican War of 1846 1848 that yielded the southwest and California, pur-
chase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the annexation of Hawaii in
1898. In its land acquisitions from 1781 through 1867, the federal govern-
ment spent around $88 million to obtain legal rights to just over 1.8 billion
acres a bargain at under 5 cents per acre (Sato, 1973/1886, p. 76).
Given the stunning consolidation that came to comprise the public
domain of the United States, we may investigate patrimonial dynamics by
asking how the federal government held or distributed parts of the public
domain. Keeping in mind Weber’s dictum (2013/1922, p. 20) that we should
not use ideal types as pigeonholes for trying to classify social phenomena,
but rather as models that can help ferret out approximations to one or more
culturally meaningful logics of social action, relationship, and organization, I
will not argue that U.S. federal land policies were quintessentially patrimo-
nial. Instead, I will explore alternative ways that patrimonial logics under-
girded federal policies, and to what degree state actions had wider
patrimonial consequences. I first note the patrimonial legacies of European
16 JOHN R. HALL

colonization. I then offer an exploratory examination of two distinct yet

overlapping “moments” of federal land distribution from the late eighteenth
century through 1891 (when the Revision Act signaled an end of the most
intense era of federal land acquisition and distribution): (1) general distribu-
tion to speculators and homesteaders; and (2) land grants to railroads.1

Colonial Patrimonialism

Early American colonization, coming as it did from the Old World, brought
forward many of the features of European social organization, including
patrimonial ones. Yet the motives and goals of colonization were diverse and
shifting, especially in relation to changes in the political economy of
England. Thus, forms of colonization were complex. Moreover, there was
often a disjuncture between the legal and political framework of colonization
and what happened on the ground, where indigenous Americans, squatters,
and settlers more generally often ignored law and contract.
Patrimonial features of early colonization contributed significantly but
sometimes dialectically to how land was held and distributed once the colo-
nies obtained independence. Most fundamentally, the scramble for colonies
by the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Swedes was based on the pre-
mise that because a crown in principle reserved the right in title to all lands
claimed in its name, it had the authority to use or dispose of those lands as it
wished. The English crown, which ended up claiming the lands of the thirteen
original colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, no doubt
pursued diverse goals, including the general imperialistic one of territorial
expansion that Schumpeter (1951) described as ultimately irrational, as well
as more obviously economic goals of trade and revenue (Bond, 1919; Harris,
1953, p. 290). Both goals that were vaguely imperial and more concrete ones
required settlement of the land, and across the middle and southern colonies,
the headright system made royal land grants available to people who would
pay for their own or (often indentured) others’ transportation to America, in
the bargain, relieving overpopulation, unemployment, and imprisonment in
the British isles. Royal land grants by Britain in North America amounted to
patrimonial distributions to grantees who accepted requirements of develop-
ment. This system, as Harris (1953, Chapter 13) observes, anticipated the
homesteading system used after the revolution. Although there are important
differences, the incompletely ineffectual implementations of the two systems
shared a tendency to give rise to squatting and other extra-legal practices by
both pioneers and speculators.
Patrimonialism in America 17

During the colonial era, the headright system differed substantially in its
details from colony to colony, and its administration in any given colony
took place in the shadow of broader policies and political considerations
concerning land. Religious colonists founded New England territories
(Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut) as corporate colonies, and the
crown’s purposes could not be realized by directly patrimonial methods.
Thus, a generally more equitable distribution of land obtained there than
elsewhere (Harris, 1953, p. 287; Kaufman, 2009). Other colonies were
either organized as crown-chartered companies (Virginia, initially), or
through direct royal patrimonial grants to individuals (Pennsylvania,
Delaware, Maryland), or they were settled as direct extensions of royally
administered territory (New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia
by the time of independence, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia)
(Harris, 1953, p. 75). The character of the latter colonies differed substan-
tially depending on how directly the crown was involved. However,
whether the crown or a proprietor held power, the patrimonial features
were substantial.
In the first place, the English monarchs treated colonization as the settle-
ment of hostile territory, and in a number of instances, including the patri-
monial grant of Maryland to Lord Baltimore as proprietor, they borrowed
directly from a template of territorial administration that William the
Conqueror first used in England in the eleventh century, when he granted
the Bishop of Durham extensive feudal powers of governance and settle-
ment in order to provide a “buffer” to protect English manors from the
wild Celts in Scotland to the north (Harris, 1953, pp. 39, 72, 120;
Livermore, 1968, pp. 31 32).
Second, royal charters tended to reflect conventional principles of patri-
monial rule. For example, they typically reserved to the crown one-fifth of
all gold and silver obtained in a territory, and such reservations were
entailed in further subdivision or transfer. In addition, the English crown
or the proprietor could grant land to fulfill particular purposes deemed
necessary or worthy. For example, the crown settled a debt of £16,000 by
granting to William Penn’s father the territory that would become
Pennsylvania (Harris, 1953, pp. 121 25). Grants also often were used to
accomplish more civic purposes such as rewarding individuals for military
or other service, providing for the development of frontier forts, funding
schools, or promoting what were regarded as essential or useful industries
saltworks, flourmills, sawmills, ironworks, glassworks, or even house sites
meant to attract individuals in particular trades (Harris, 1953, pp. 197 198,
255 272).
18 JOHN R. HALL

Third, charters for all the colonies other than those in New England
required that any distribution of land include provisions of quitrent, which
required the payment of an annual fee. Sometimes the payment was
nominal two beaver pelts or the like sometimes monetary. Quitrent
had its origins in escape (being “quit”) from feudal obligations such as
payments in kind, labor, or military service. Thus, even after a sale of land,
the crown or a proprietor asserted in principle the prerogative of ultimate
claim to it, in a relationship that had distinct and conventional patrimonial
features. Yet the implications of the patrimonial practice of quitrent stem
not from its persistence, but from the specific pressures that led to its
eventual collapse.
As a classic analysis by Bond (1919) shows, the crown and proprietors
could and occasionally did realize substantial revenues from quitrents.
Especially the proprietors depended for their own incomes on either quit-
rents or the sale of land. Whether carried out by the crown or a proprietor,
a well organized collection of quitrents would sustain the incentive for large
landowners either to settle land or to organize settlement by others, in
order to realize income that could be used to pay quitrents. In North
America, however, the English crown became caught in a vortex of shifting
and complex interests, including (1) its own use of patrimonial grants in the
great tradition of European royal patrimony to reward faithful servants,
settle crown debts, and the like, and (2) the interests of recipients of large
land grants whether absentee owners in Europe or proprietors and man-
orial estate holders in the colonies in holding land for speculative pur-
poses. Where quitrent rolls were maintained and rents collected, Bond
(1919, pp. 445 446) argued, speculation in land was impeded, and the set-
tlement and cultivation of smallholdings, advanced. In the Puritan-
organized colonies, the township system of settlement tended to promote
settlement of both the best lands and less desirable areas (Conover, 1923,
p. 9), and colonists resisted the principle of quitrents. Elsewhere, the pro-
prietary principle was less important than economic self-interest (Bond,
1919, pp. 456 457): the interests of the crown or proprietors ran up against
the interests of land speculators who, though they often obtained land
as the beneficiaries of patrimonial relationships, sought in the end,
successfully to rid themselves of the burdens of patrimonial obligations,
most notably, quitrent.
Indeed, speculators’ practices of land acquisition and sale were central
to the original establishments of colonies and their subsequent develop-
ment. As Sakolski (1957, p. 43) observed, “ownership and profitable dispo-
sal of land were, with a few exceptions, the prime objectives. Absentee
Patrimonialism in America 19

ownership was the rule, and the spirit of ‘landlordism’ in England and
Ireland, which was then taking root, was extended to the vast unsettled
areas of America.” These objectives drove the development of speculative
practices that would bridge from the colonial era to the post-revolutionary
United States. The London Company (later renamed the Virginia
Company) and the Plymouth Company (later named the Massachusetts
Bay Company) both received royal land patents for huge amounts of terri-
tory. As well, there can be no doubt that Lord Baltimore and William Penn
organized their proprietorships to realize economic gain from the distribu-
tion of land, sometimes along the lines of manorial estates (Livermore,
1968, p. 35). In the crown colonies, men who served on executive councils
of the governors used their positions to acquire extensive tracts, and
indeed, given the typically poor levels of crown remuneration for their ser-
vice, they had every incentive to do so. Already in New York, the Dutch
West India Company had granted manorial estates to quasi-feudal lords
called patroons, including the famous 700,000 acres that went to Killian
Van Rensselaer, on which only 281 families would settle by 1767 about
one family for every 2,500 acres. Once the English took over, they followed
the Dutch lead by offering large colonial grants of land along the Hudson
and Mohawk Rivers, thus continuing the consolidation of an interlocked
elite of landholding families prominent in politics and commerce that
would persist for generations (Friedenberg, 1992, pp. 53 66; Harris, 1953,
pp. 91 97; Sakolski, 1957, pp. 30 32).
A detailed study of one landowner (Fox, 1949) suggests a related point,
that disentangling office in governance and private land ambitions in the
Mohawk Valley during the colonial period would be a difficult matter.
Further south, things were not radically different. Witness one George
Washington, who had served as a land surveyor and agent for Lord
Fairfax’s estates in northern Virginia holdings of around 5 million acres.
After the French and Indian War, Washington sent his associate, Captain
William Crawford, across the Alleghenies to obtain preemptive rights to
prime parcels. Washington insisted that Crawford should not be discour-
aged by the British prohibition against colonial governors granting land
patents west of the Alleghenies. As he wrote to Crawford, “I can never
look upon that proclamation in any other light (but this I say between our-
selves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians
and must fall of course in a few years especially when those Indians are
consenting to our Occupying the Lands” (q. in Sakolski, 1957, p. 53). He
added, “By this time it may be easy for you to discover that my plan is to
secure a good deal of land” (Chandler, 1979/1945, p. 71).
20 JOHN R. HALL

Both before and after Washington wrote, enormous transfers of land

were arranged under a variety of auspices 900,000 acres of land in New
York obtained by Thomas Wharton in 1770 through “dummy buyers” who
each obtained 30,000 acres and immediately reconveyed their tracts to him;
77,622 acres in what was then New York to Ira and Ethan Allen, who in
turn sold 16,793 acres in the three years before the Revolutionary War;
200,000 acres in 1778 to each member of the Ohio Company that had been
formed in 1748; 400,000 acres granted by the Virginia and North Carolina
legislatures to partners in the Transylvania scheme in compensation for
their voided claims (Livermore, 1968, pp. 75 82, 90 97, 129 131).
However, the circumstances of such grants were changing. To be sure,
proposals for two land development schemes the Transylvania plan and
the 1770s Vandalia proposal (backed by Ben Franklin and his son, the then
governor of New Jersey) resembled the eleventh-century palatinate of the
Bishop of Durham in their visions of patrimonial powers of governance.
However, increasingly, those who came to hold land found their strongest
interest in it as an economic asset that could be sold, and thus, they con-
cerned themselves less with retaining governing power than with assuring
their free rights to title. Initially, both colonial corporations and individual
proprietors depended on royal grants that assured them the proprietary
right to distribute lands. But those who sought to sell land to settlers had
no need to claim a monopoly to proprietary rights beyond rights to deed
land to others. Therefore, the New England freeholding model came to pre-
dominate, such that individuals as well as free associations of individuals in
joint-stock companies could hold title to land independently of governmen-
tal grant, license, or corporate charter. For Livermore (1968, pp. 30,
34 36, 73), these developments suggest that land companies are properly
to be understood as the antecedents of the modern corporate form. And as
Kaufman (2008) shows, the New England colonies led the way in institu-
tional development of the private corporation as a legal form, due to their
pre-independence status as royally chartered corporations. In this light,
corporations themselves have their origins in patrimonial grants of
privilege.2
Overall, under European colonization, the patrimonial principle that the
state owns a public domain not otherwise legally held by its subjects came
to be applied to the vast territories of North America originally occupied
by the indigenous population. Outside New England, the state or its
designee could retain rights to specified land resources or uses and to quit-
rents, and it could grant land according to its own interests, or to promote
specific state purposes in the settlement and development of territory. All
Patrimonialism in America 21

these classic features of patrimonial colonization other than quitrent could

equally be found elsewhere, for example, in sixteenth-century Brazil (Hall,
1984). Yet, for the most part, land in the British colonies of North America
became subject to transactions of exchange that exceeded classic patterns
of patrimonial monopolization and estate-centered agriculture. For exam-
ple, land-grant recipients sometimes ceded political authority to representa-
tive councils, and in doing so, they in effect gave up their interest in
political patrimonialism to concentrate on economic gain from their hold-
ings. Equally important, in a number of instances, a class of elite families,
well connected to government and each other, and interested in land specu-
lation, both sought relief from patrimonial obligations of quitrent and
endeavored to operate under conditions of association that minimized
unpredictable conditions of crown charter or license. The British found it
difficult at best to enforce patrimonial prerogatives in the colonies, much
less in the sprawling lands beyond the fringe of settlement, and the interests
of speculators in acquiring as much land as possible won out against royal
and proprietor patrimonial interests.
Although initially it was the individual adventurer or an association of
individuals who pursued speculative interests, both the amounts of money
and land and the managerial challenges of development in large-scale trans-
actions tended to favor the establishment of joint-stock companies. But
whatever the form of ownership, large-scale ownership of land created con-
ditions that might best be described as those of private capitalist colonial
patrimonialism: within large tracts, landowners possessed de facto patrimo-
nial monopolies, subject to prevailing laws (Weber, 2013/1922, p. 240).
Already, before the revolution, extensive landholding classes of estate own-
ers and speculators held a conservative interest in maintaining the privi-
leged positions that they had gained from patrimonial grants, further
constraints on which they would in turn resist. Moreover, after the revolu-
tion, the U.S. federal government became more effective than the British
crown at exercising patrimonial prerogatives, albeit in altered ways.

Speculators, Settlers, and the Federal Domain

Turner (1921) is famous for his argument that the expansion of the U.S.
frontier was the driving force that fundamentally shaped American institu-
tions and personal character. Central to his “frontier thesis” were claims
concerning the availability of free land. Thus, Turner disputed French his-
torian E.G. Boutmy’s view that American society “is not so much a
22 JOHN R. HALL

democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation,

and capitalization of its enormous territory.” True, Turner thought
Boutmy correct on one point, “that the traits of the man of the interior
were due to the free lands of the West.” As Turner argued, “these free lands
promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy”
(1921, p. 211, 259). But he was hardly a naı̈ve Pangloss. Turner wrote: “the
democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intol-
erant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual
liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits”
(1921, p. 32).
The difference between Boutmy’s and Turner’s interpretations is
reflected in debates over the past century about how the federal govern-
ment managed its public domain in the period after independence through
1891, when the Revision Act largely ended distribution. Metanarratives
focus either on corrupt plunder of the public domain or on the great
American democratic impulses cultivated by its distribution.3
Substantial historical evidence can be marshaled to either interpretation.
Examining distributions of the federal public domain during the nineteenth
century is thus the master key that allows differently shaped tumblers to
fall into place, opening the door to an understanding of whether and how,
during a period marked by rapid population expansion and capitalist
industrialization, under new conditions of title to property and shifting
goals of the federal government in relation to the interplay of shifting terri-
torial, fiscal, and political-economic conditions, state patrimonialism
entered a trajectory of transformation to a new, modern form.
The complex and shifting policies concerning the public domain were
the focus of national and state politics, as well as elite, popular, and sec-
tional interests only marginally less intense than those concerning slavery
(and perhaps tariffs). Eastern capitalists sometimes feared that easily avail-
able land would drain off their supply of labor, but they also hoped for
western markets. Western state governments resented the unavailability of
the federal public domain for taxation (Robbins, 1942, pp. 177, 217). In
these crosspressures, the federal government made major portions of its
domain available for purchase. Speculators and developers of townsites
(called town-jobbers) and land-jobbers tended to obtain the most desirable
tracts large stretches of land, often at bargain prices in no small part
because many of them had strong political connections (or were politicians
or present or former government officials themselves).
Speculation in real estate, as we were sharply reminded recently,
has its risks. In the early years of federal land distribution, many
Patrimonialism in America 23

investors individuals and companies fared poorly, especially if they

bought into the bubble leading up to the panic of 1837 (McGrane, 1965,
Chapter 2; Robbins, 1942, pp. 59 71). But others did well indeed.
Occasionally, speculators amassed huge holdings, which they, or first pur-
chasers from them, turned into the largest farms of their day, sometimes
worked by paid laborers or tenant farmers (for cases in Illinois, see Gates,
1945). Soldiers sometimes received land warrants in recognition of military
service but these in turn were often snapped up by speculators (Sakolski,
1957, pp. 76 77, 99). Pioneering families and groups could not always
afford to purchase land, but many were able to do so either from the
government or speculators. However, in numerous instances, land hunger
led pioneers to push west in advance of the surveys and administrative
procedures and occupy land as squatters, in the hope that settling and
improving farmland would count for something when conflicting claims to
ownership came to a head, or better, that “preemption” would grant them
the right to buy title over other contenders (as a series of acts of Congress
indeed permitted). Overall, both speculators and settlers benefited from
sales of the public domain.
The central fact undergirding the public domain of the state and its dis-
tribution after the Revolutionary War concerned the termination of basic
patrimonial conditions of land ownership. The hated quickrents came to an
end, along with primogeniture and entails that had kept land closely held
(Harris, 1953, pp. 371 380). Moreover, for individuals other than Tories,
the Continental Congress moved to secure private titles to land already
held before the revolution. As a consequence, for private parties, one of the
great counterpoints to patrimonialism a relatively free capacity to sell
and buy land emerged much more strongly after the Revolutionary War.
However, these changes did not alter the patrimonial character of the pub-
lic domain itself, nor did they eliminate practices of state patrimonialism;
they simply shifted the circumstances of its practice. Indeed, as I will show,
if anything, the U.S. federal government became more effective than the
British had been at assembling and controlling the development of its patri-
monial domain. How then, did state patrimonialism play out after the revo-
lution? If we ask what the goals of the state were, and whether and how the
public domain was used to advance those goals, we can efficiently deter-
mine the degree to which the state acted in a patrimonial way.
Historians and land-tenure analysts are in relative agreement that the
goal of the state in the period following the revolution up through the pas-
sage of the Homestead Act in 1862 was what Geisler (1984, p. 9) calls “the
orderly establishment of domestic empire.” States would not be wise to
24 JOHN R. HALL

entertain such a goal if the result were to contravene the state interest in
holding particularly valuable land, especially land that the state might sub-
sequently use to advance its purposes. However, other things being equal,
the goal of empire is inherently tied up with settlement of land, which yields
many and diffuse benefits. Most centrally, creating “facts on the ground”
through settlement offers the strongest non-military basis for claiming terri-
tory, and socially occupied and developed land offers the prospect of gener-
ating economic activity that can produce commodities and goods, provide
markets for commodities and goods produced in already established states,
yield taxes, and establish a basis on which to address other problems con-
fronting a state, such as unemployment and surplus population. Of course,
such actions assume a modern view of the state, but they do mark the gen-
eral frame within which federal politicians and government acted from the
revolution to the end of the nineteenth century (Robbins, 1942).
The general goal of settlement, however, was tempered by an altogether
different and more immediate goal of seeking revenue for the federal
government. After the revolution, the federal government found itself
saddled with foreign and domestic debt and strapped for cash. However, it
possessed and continued to build up tremendous resources in
land. Thus, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “I turn to this precious
resource as that which will in every event liberate us from our domestic
debt, and perhaps, too, from our foreign one” (Geisler, 1984, p. 9; Sato,
1973/1886, p. 128; Jefferson, quoted in Conover, 1923, p. 10). From the
very beginning, the federal government substituted abundant lands for
capital.
The transfer of state assets under conditions of unencumbered land titles
amounted to a weak sort of patrimonial exchange, but a patrimonial one,
nonetheless. Federal sales of land sometimes hampered, sometimes encour-
aged settlement, and always affected how it occurred. The government
might grant preemption rights for special purposes, such as the construc-
tion of grist and sawmills. And it could place restrictive conditions on land
sale, often requiring settlement and development of land if the owner were
to prevent title from reverting to the state. However, with these conditions
met, transfer of title was to be finalized without further legal obligation
beyond those applied to all lands. Yet such weak state patrimonial arrange-
ments were hardly without precedent, even under far stronger patrimonial
conditions. Thus, Queen Elizabeth of England distributed church lands
confiscated during the Reformation to settle debts and obligations, and as I
noted above, the whole of Pennsylvania came into the hands of William
Penn on the basis of the settlement of a debt of Charles I.
Patrimonialism in America 25

The deeper patrimonial question has to do with the conditions under

which the government sold large parcels of land, and what political rela-
tionships facilitated such sales and in turn were sustained by them. After
the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, two
broad and contending policy tendencies emerged a “conservative”
approach that emphasized gaining state revenue through the sale of large
tracts of land for speculation, and the more “liberal” Jeffersonian approach
that would provide small and cheaply priced parcels of land in order to
encourage direct settlement. Addressing the question as Secretary of the
Treasury in 1790, Alexander Hamilton tilted toward “the facility of advan-
tageous sales, according to the probable course of purchases,” as opposed
to settlers, arguing that “the former, as an operator of finance, claims pri-
mary attention.” But he hoped to “conciliate both” interests (quoted in
Conover, 1923, p. 11).
Congress continued the tradition of speculation by officeholders that
had been set in the colonial period. Thus, the interests of speculators were
almost “naturally” assured, whereas other interests had to be asserted. In
practice, over the next half-century, a variety of policies favored specula-
tors, including the pricing of land, purchase requirements (initially a mini-
mum of 640 acres, a square mile, without any limit to larger parcels), and
terms of payment that placed direct federal purchase beyond the reach of
ordinary pioneers. Already before Hamilton wrote in 1787, the federal gov-
ernment reached a deal for sale of 964,285 acres of its domain for $642,857
to the Ohio Company. In 1794 came a sale of 248,540 acres to John Cleves
Symmes of New Jersey. Yet high prices yielded only slow sales. Indeed, a
1796 act increased the minimum price per acre from $1 to $2 while main-
taining the 640-acre minimum purchase.
In 1812, the federal government established the General Land Office to
conduct surveys and handle sales, with all its officials and employees for-
bidden to “directly or indirectly be concerned in the purchase of any right,
title or interest, in any public land.” The Land Office faced substantial pres-
sures to make cheap land available for settlement, and these pressures
increased over the first half of the nineteenth century: there were armed
insurrections and tenant revolts, and squatters might show up with their
rifles at an auction where the land they had occupied was to be sold off; in
Iowa, squatting settlers in advance of surveys or sales established “land
clubs” or “claims associations” that amounted to de facto extra-legal local
governments (Cochrane, 2003, p. 7; Conover, 1923, pp. 19, 10, 16 17, 19
[quote]; Geisler, 1984, p. 10; Hibbard, 1965/1924, Chapters11, 12; Sato,
1973/1886, p. 130, 137, 139 141).
26 JOHN R. HALL

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Congress modified poli-

cies through a series of major land acts (1800, 1804, 1820, 1841, and 1854).
It eased or tightened terms of credit depending on whether concerns about
defaults, speculation, or sale predominated. Sometimes it lowered prices or
offered unsold lands at sharply reduced prices (the latter, through the
Gradation Act of 1854, a bonanza for speculators and mining and timber
interests that disposed of 25 million acres, an area 197 miles square, until
the act was rescinded in 1862) (Cochrane, 2003, p. 7; Conover, 1923, p. 26;
Sato, 1973/1886, pp. 144 150). In addition, Congress passed 38 preemp-
tion laws between 1799 and 1840, meant to offer terms for granting land to
squatters. Debate continues about the intentions behind some of these
policy changes, but the consequences intended or not were often that
speculators and “big” interests found ways to benefit, for example, taking
advantage of credit-payment plans by leveraging even more money into
speculation, or using their privileged knowledge of policies to take advan-
tage of circumstances about which ordinary citizens remained uninformed.
Already in the first decade of the nineteenth century, settlers found
difficulty obtaining good land at reasonable prices because land companies
had gotten there ahead of them, and this continued to be an issue despite
federal efforts to promote settlement (Conover, 1923, p. 26; Hibbard,
1965/1924, p. 104; Robbins, 1942, p. 91).
By 1835, the federal government had completely paid down its debt.
Subsequently, as the preemption act of 1841 signaled, the goals of settle-
ment and development began to trump any federal interest in revenue. In
turn, the 1862 Homestead Act along with the 1866 Southern Homestead
Act for former slaves were supposed to offer the ultimate basis for pio-
neering families to acquire 160-acre farms for free. But these opportunities
came long after the federal government had disposed of the best farmlands,
and there were conditions of settlement to be met (Cochrane, 2003,
pp. 8 9; Geisler, 1984, p. 12; Sato, 1973/1886, pp. 170 178).
Homesteaders thus found themselves trying to make a go of sodbusting
160 acres on the Nebraska plains or even less fertile land. Understandably,
then, the success of the Homestead Act was less than stunning: out of
552,112 initial land entries through 1882, only 194,488 would finally qualify
for fee-simple title. In part, the explanation for the low rate of final transfer
may lie in mineral and timber stripping practices on homestead land
acquired through use of “dummy” names. All the same, the government
did provide free land, and through the 1920s, more than 1.33 million home-
steads were established (Hibbard, 1965/1924, Chapters 17, 18, Table 27;
Robbins, 1942, pp. 69, 240, 245 247).
Patrimonialism in America 27

The sale of such substantial portions of the federal public domain to

speculators and settlers had diverse consequences. It encouraged a rampant
individualism still to be found in the American character, in which “liberty”
was often taken as the right by both speculators and settlers to do
what they wished in relation to federal laws and public lands. It led to set-
tlement of the western United States, sometimes directly by pioneers, in
other instances through a churning of land speculation, division, improve-
ment, and resale, with the speculators and developers moving further west
each cycle. Land sales also gave rise to tens upon tens of thousands of frau-
dulent land entries, along with an entire catalog of shady operations, auc-
tion combinations, corruptions, graft, scams, frauds, swindlings, and other
evasions of the law by speculators (and sometimes settlers themselves),
often made possible by politicians and government employees who treated
public office as a source of private benefit. Yet such practices did not
exactly provoke public outcry: as Robert Hill observed early in the twenti-
eth century, “the country at large has not objected so long as the abuses
were not too glaring or too pernicious, did not cover too wide a range, or
did not affect someone’s personal interests.” Practices of unequal and unde-
mocratic land distribution, he lamented, “not only have been tolerated, but,
it would seem encouraged” (1910, pp. 150, 151 [quotes], 155 160; see also
Hibbard, 1965/1924, Chapter 12; Sakolski, 1957, pp. 139 143 and passim).
Overall, the wealthy and the well connected gained opportunities to
amass extensive private patrimony in land, which in turn could maintain
the position of a family for generations, fund capitalist investment, or serve
as the mother lode to be dribbled out for sale in the “growth machine” of
real-estate development. As historian Paul Gates put the matter, “In practi-
cally every town, large or small, the local squire, the bank president,
the owner of numerous mortgages, the resident of the ‘big house,’ the
man whose wife was the leader of ‘society,’ got his start and a substantial
start as a result of the upward surge of land values in the nineteenth
century” (quoted in Sakolski, 1957, p. 132).
More fundamental was the question of how the amount of land indivi-
duals owned might affect the character of ownership. Thus, in the second
session of Congress during the administration of Andrew Jackson, Senator
Robert Walker of Mississippi warned, “In vain shall we have struck down
the feudal system with its accompanying relation of lard [sic] and vassal, if
we create and continue here this worse than feudal vassalage, the system of
American landlords, engrossing millions of acres, and regulating the terms
of sale and settlement” (quoted in Robbins, 1942, p. 68). It was not beyond
the recognition of Walker, a nineteenth-century politician, that speculation
28 JOHN R. HALL

based on state policies of patrimonial distribution produced a new kind of

private patrimonialism. Certainly, the sale of public lands achieved the
basic patrimonial goals of the federal government reducing its debt and
facilitating the settlement and development of the territories it amassed. In
turn, the manner in which it met these goals helped shape the institutional
structures of American wealth, political economy, and political culture.
Turner famously saw the benefits of “free lands.” However, other, less
equitable policies have only rarely been acknowledged. Perhaps the frank-
est expression of “conservative” interests is to be found in a comment in
1827 by Richard Rush, the Secretary of the Treasury under President John
Quincy Adams. For Rush, “the ratio of capital to population should, if
possible, be kept on the increase.” He went on, “it is a proposition too
plain to require elucidation, that the creation of capital is retarded, rather
than accelerated, by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface
of soil. Anything that may serve to hold back this tendency to diffusion
from running too far and too long into an extreme can scarcely prove
otherwise than salutary” (quoted in Robbins, 1942, p. 42). According to
Rush’s logic, not only would settlement of land need to be channeled in
order to promote economic development, but this channeling would be
best accomplished if moneyed interests took the lead. Here, then, is an
early and perhaps incipient version of focused state promotion of innova-
tive development that has been described for a much later period in
the United States by Block and Keller (2006). The developmental economic
interest of this particular version of a state patrimonial logic can be thrown
into sharper relief by considering federal land grants to railroad companies.

Federal Lands and the Railroads

In the development of capitalism, the use of the public domain to promote

collective goals to be achieved under private auspices has a deep patrimo-
nial history. But the onset of the industrial era significantly altered the scale
and import of state patrimonial support for capitalism. In the United
States, the central early case concerns the railroads, which both drove
industrial production and spread its goods and social formation territo-
rially. In this channel of development, the U.S. federal government largely
abandoned any pretense of egalitarian policy in land settlement and tilted
decidedly toward the “conservative” model of providing huge quantities of
land to highly concentrated business interests. The lands granted far
exceeded the right-of-way for track: they included subsidies of lands adja-
cent to rights-of-way that the railroad companies could sell to finance
Patrimonialism in America 29

construction. This arrangement gave railroad companies considerable

leverage to structure subsequent settlement and development according to
their own interests. The lands granted to railroads bypassed any open sale,
thereby making the settlement of huge amounts of American territory a lar-
gely privately organized activity, yet one that reserved governance of such
territories to states and territorial and local governments.
The precedent for granting U.S. public lands for railroad development
came early in the nineteenth century under circumstances in which “railway
fever” gripped investors, states, and municipalities that saw distinct eco-
nomic advantage to be gained according to how development transpired
(Dobbin, 1994, pp. 36 53). In 1830, the federal government authorized the
state of Ohio to use an 1828 canal land grant to finance railroad construc-
tion instead. In 1833, it allowed another canal land grant, to Illinois, to be
used for railroad construction; after years of financial panic and depres-
sion, a substitute plan was put in place in 1850. The question of whether
the state of Illinois would build, own, and operate the railroad or re-grant
land to a company was left open. But Illinois made the latter choice, lead-
ing to private construction of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Subsequently, federal legislation directly granted federal lands (and
bonds) to railroad companies. After the Civil War ended rivalries over
routes, land grants led to the construction of the Central Pacific, Union
Pacific, and Northern Pacific lines, and what became the Atchison,
Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. The typical terms of grants were extremely
generous. The conventional direct-grant formula held that the federal gov-
ernment should retain even-numbered township sections, while the railroad
company would be granted a swath of odd-numbered sections along the
roadbed, extending six miles or sometimes twenty miles on either side.
Grants typically required railroads to carry the public mails at rates set by
Congress, and to move military equipment and personnel. They ended in
1871, by which time public opinion, influenced by scandals of corruption
on multiple fronts, had turned to strong opposition (Dobbin, 1994,
pp. 54 59; Perrow, 2002, pp. 141 157). Over a period of less than two dec-
ades, a total amount of public land enormous by any standard was distrib-
uted to railroad companies, through state land grants (37.8 million acres)
or by the federal government (91.2 million acres) 129 million acres, or
201,562 square miles (449 miles square). Private companies received lands
covering a total area somewhat larger than the states of Illinois, Iowa, and
Nebraska combined. The Union Pacific obtained a grant of almost 11
million acres; the Central Pacific, over 7.3 million; the Northern Pacific, a
whopping 38.9 million acres certainly the largest amounts of land ever
privately owned outside monarchic patrimonialism (Conover, 1923, p. 27;
30 JOHN R. HALL

Robbins, 1942, pp. 276 277; Sakolski, 1957, Chapters 14, 15; for railroad
land data, Hibbard, 1965/1924, p. 264; White, 2011, pp. 76 78).4 As
William Roy observes, “It is difficult to imagine that the railroad compa-
nies could have been built as extensively or as quickly without vast govern-
ment support” (1997, pp. 83 97).
Selling land necessarily became a preoccupation of railroad companies
that possessed so much of it. An Illinois Central land promotion pamphlet
extolled the “advantages of settling in Illinois” compared to further west,
mentioned “towns and villages springing up with unexampled rapidity,”
and reported Chicago market prices for corn, wheat, and oats (Illinois
Central Railroad Company, 1857). But company land-sale strategies were
complex and mixed. The Illinois Central mortgaged some land to provide
immediate capital for construction. It sold other land with stipulations
requiring cultivation prior to release of a deed. Quick sales generated rev-
enue, whereas holding land back avoided taxation, and allowed railroads
to benefit from the increase in land values due to railroad construction and
settlers’ development of adjacent lands obtained from the government. By
1872, railroads began to obtain judicial relief from taxes on granted land
(thus spawning a major chapter in populist resentment). Moreover, the
federal government offered the Central Pacific Railroad Company up to
$50 million in 6%, 30-year construction loans to accompany its land
grants. The net long-term gain by railroads has often been depicted as tend-
ing toward the astronomical. Over a period of 40 years, Illinois Central
Railroad land sales by themselves recouped some six-sevenths of the entire
initial cost of constructing its line. Evidence entered during the 1920s
dispute between the Northern Pacific and the U.S. Forest Service over rail-
road rights to land within federal forest reserves shows that over the time
since its initial 1864 land grant, the railroad realized $136 million in land
sales in relation to a $70 million cost of construction, or a profit of 94% on
land transactions alone (Decker, 1964; Hibbard, 1965/1924, pp. 241 268).
Truly, what an English capitalist remarked concerning the Illinois Central
holds more generally: “This is not a railroad company, it is a land com-
pany” (quoted in Sakolski, 1957, p. 161). Or, as historian White (2011,
p. 39) wrote concerning corrupt practices and cronyism tied to the trans-
continental railroads, it is best to “regard them not as new businesses
devoted to the efficient sale of transportation but as corporate containers
for financial manipulation and political networking.”
Both in the politics of the day and among historians, debates about
national subsidization of railroad companies have tended toward one of
two opposing positions that a highly successful federal policy set in
Patrimonialism in America 31

motion the development of the American west, or that buccaneer capitalists

plundered lands of the public domain for private profit. Yet these opposed
arguments are not contradictory. On the one hand, arrangements for the
grants and loans largely developed through social networks of interested
parties, and they provided a private benefit that could be subjected to ques-
tions concerning its constitutionality. On the other hand, proponents of the
grants argued that the federal government was land rich, and that money
was little in the way of object. Of the Central Pacific scheme,
Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Wilson asked rhetorically,
“What are $75,000,000 or a $100,000,000 in opening a railroad across
regions of this continent that shall connect the people of the Atlantic and
the Pacific, and bind us together?” His answer: “Nothing! As to the lands, I
don’t begrudge them.” (For his part, Representative Timothy Phelps of
California called construction “a military necessity”; soon after leaving
Congress, he became founding president of the Southern Pacific Railroad,
which would become a direct beneficiary of congressional legislation.) It is
also important to recognize that the railroad companies themselves, not
having the benefit of hindsight about profits, undertook substantial finan-
cial risk, and the sheer amount of capital investment required land grants
not withstanding was breathtaking. Moreover, the conditions of con-
struction could be extremely challenging, because of the terrain, and due to
continuing threats of attack by Native Americans (Hibbard, 1965/1924,
pp. 241 251; Phelps, q. in White, 2011, p. 70; Sanborn, 1899, pp. 86 92;
Wilson, q. in Sakolski, 1957, p. 166).
Nevertheless, by even the most conservative estimates, the railroad com-
panies on the whole did very well indeed. Economist Lloyd Mercer under-
took a comparative study of land-grant and loan subsidies, controlling for
inflation over time, (something most anecdotal discussions fail to do).
Mercer’s methodology structurally underestimates benefits of subsidies, but
its results are nonetheless revealing. In my view, his study has methodologi-
cal problems stemming from questionable assumptions, namely, analyzing
profits for a railroad system as a whole (what he asserts to be “the relevant
unit”), rather than looking narrowly at land-grant sales versus costs for
specific sections that received support of federal subsidies (Mercer, 1982,
pp. 77, 87). Moreover, the study does not address the question of whether
railroads benefited from orchestrating settlement patterns of land along
their lines, and it does not factor in the benefits to railroad companies of
land speculations for townsites, railroad terminals, and other locations
made especially valuable by proximity to railroad lines (Sakolski, 1957,
pp. 166 167). Based on this methodology, Mercer concludes that only in
32 JOHN R. HALL

one U.S. case the Northern Pacific did federal land and loans make
the difference between profitability and unprofitability of construction (the
only economically rational basis on which government subsidy would have
a rationale). In two cases, the Santa Fe system and the Texas and Pacific,
even subsidies did not create conditions of profitability measured for the
system as a whole. In three other cases, the subsidies were ex post facto
unnecessary, because the profitability even without aid would have
exceeded the opportunity cost of capital (Mercer, 1982, pp. 142 143).
Debates about the size and importance of subsidies are important, but
they do not address the issue of patrimonialism. Mercer’s analysis is reveal-
ing concerning the conventional orientation of economists: he frames his
study of federal land grants and loans as “intervention in the operation of
the market” (1982, p. 2). But in his analysis, “the market” figures at most
only in abstract terms, for example, in calculations about the putative oppor-
tunity cost of capital. Yet Mercer’s historical narrative shows that the land
grants and loans by the federal government in support of railroad construc-
tion resulted from close negotiations and lobbying, at some remove from any
market situation. The federal government distributed huge amounts of its
public-domain lands to companies in order to promote the construction of
railroad lines, which benefited the railroad companies and helped meet public
goals as well the settlement and development of the American west.
The role of patrimonial networks and terms of obligation in the distribu-
tion of federal public lands to railroad companies could be further detailed
through additional research. Yet on the face of it, the case of the railroads
demonstrates a key transition of federal patrimonial practices: the federal
government used the distribution of land in part to promote public objec-
tives of the state, but under conditions increasingly centered in law rather
than solely personal relationships, and at a time when economic transac-
tions increasingly were regulated by contract. Under these conditions, the
patrimonial social relationships became translated into a matrix of con-
tracting between actors operating in a network that linked the state with
specific private capitalist parties.

CONCLUSION

The Revision Act of 1891 ended some of the most easily abused land-
distribution policies of the federal government in the U.S. Preemption
options were closed off and railroad land grants for unbuilt lines, forfeited.
Patrimonialism in America 33

In addition, loopholes were closed in timber, mining, and desert land acts
(not analyzed here). After the Revision Act, political momentum shifted
somewhat toward conservation of the public domain and the licensing of
its use, for example in grazing and mining. These developments changed
federal treatment of the public domain in land from what have emerged as
distinctly modern practices of patrimonial distribution to increasingly
bureaucratically rationalized management of the public domain (which
nevertheless, I strongly suspect, retained patrimonial features).
In the present analysis, rather than characterizing the U.S. federal state
as patrimonial in any essentialist way, I have asked whether, when, and
how it has acted patrimonially specifically in relation to the public domain
of land, and how its actions structured socioeconomic activity. The answers
to these questions suggest a fruitful direction in which to extend analysis of
patrimonial dynamics.
Most basically, a distinct genealogy of patrimonial practices is evident in
the history of the institutions whereby federal lands were granted or sold.
Land distribution in the United States has its origins in English practices
that date to the medieval era, of monarchs seeking to monopolize resources
in order to distribute them to dependents in ways that would advance inter-
ests both personal and public. However, faced with intense pressures
toward unencumbered land title that permitted sale and speculation, the
British found patrimonial prerogatives difficult to sustain in the American
colonies. After independence, however, the U.S. federal government conso-
lidated a more effective patrimonial practice, albeit under weaker patrimo-
nial circumstances. The federal government acquired huge amounts of a
central resource land, and, extending patrimonialist practices of the
British, it deployed the granting of rights in relation to its lands through
processes and under legally framed conditions designed to achieve various
public goals: financing the state, rewarding service to the state, settlement,
development of a national economy, and construction of an effective trans-
portation system that would encourage national economic and social inte-
gration. Private individuals and companies sometimes benefitted in
strikingly unequal and durable ways from federal policies. Overall, the
actions of the state involved the exercise of patrimonial rights in relation to
a monopolized domain that in turn not only shaped emergent economic
institutions, but socially structured the actual physical landscape where
subsequent actions would transpire, down to the present day and no doubt
beyond. In the patrimonialist practices that initiated land distribution and
railroad construction, the field of economic action was not constituted fun-
damentally as a “market.” It was constructed and circumscribed in various
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 ÍNDICE.

Páginas.
Advertencia preliminar v
Libro tercero.—Capítulo CXXIV 1
Cap. CXXV 6
Cap. CXXVI 12
Cap. CXXVII.—De cómo se levantó un indio
llamado Ciguayo que atemorizó toda la isla con
las muertes de españoles que hizo, al cual en
fin mataron.—Levantóse otro llamado Tamayo
que hizo tambien muchas muertes y daños.—De
cómo á Enrique pesaba desto, y procuró traerlo
á su compañía porque no hiciese daño, y lo
trujo.—De muchas armadas que hicieron contra
Enrique, en especial una donde hobo habla y
concierto, entre Enrique y el Capitan, de paz, y
de la liberalidad de Enrique en dar el oro que
tenía, y de la indiscrecion del Capitan, etc. 17
Cap. CXXVIII 23
Cap. CXXIX 28
Cap. CXXX 33
Cap. CXXXI 37
Cap. CXXXII 40
Cap. CXXXIII 48
Cap. CXXXIV 53
Cap. CXXXV 58
Cap. CXXXVI 65
Cap. CXXXVII 74
Cap. CXXXVIII 79
Cap. CXXXIX 83
Cap. CXL 90
Cap. CXLI 95
Cap. CXLII 99
Cap. CXLIII 104
Cap. CXLIV 109
Cap. CXLV 114
Cap. CXLVI 118
Cap. CXLVII 123
Cap. CXLVIII 127
Cap. CXLIX 132
Cap. CL 137
Cap. CLI 142
Cap. CLII 147
Cap. CLIII 151
Cap. CLIV 155
Cap. CLV 159
Cap. CLVI 165
Cap. CLVII 173
Cap. CLVIII 180
Cap. CLIX 187
Cap. CLX 193
Cap. CLXI 200
Cap. CLXII 205
Cap. CLXIII 210
Cap. CLXIV 217
Cap. CLXV 221
Cap. CLXVI 226
Cap. CLXVII 231

APÉNDICE.
Apologética historia.—Argumento 237
Capítulo I 241
Cap. II 248
Cap. III 256
Cap. IV 263
Cap. V 269
Cap. VI 276
Cap. VII 283
Cap. VIII 290
Cap. IX 295
Cap. X 301
Cap. XI 310
Cap. XII 316
Cap. XIII 321
Cap. XIV 326
Cap. XV 330
Cap. XVI 334
Cap. XVII 337
Cap. XVIII 343
Cap. XIX 348
Cap. XX 352
Cap. XXI 364
Cap. XXII 371
Cap. XXIII 377
Cap. XXXIII 383
Cap. XXXIV 390
Cap. XXXV 399
Cap. XXXVI 405
Cap. XXXVII 413
Cap. XXXVIII 422
Cap. XXXIX 427
Cap. CXX 433
Cap. CXXI 440
Cap. CXXII 447
Cap. CXXIII 453
Cap. CXXIV 456
Cap. CXXV 464
Cap. CLXVI 467
Cap. CLXVII 473
Cap. CLXXXI 477
Cap. CXCVII 481
Cap. CXCVIII 487
Cap. CXCIX 495
Cap. CCIII 497
Cap. CCIV 499
Cap. CCV 509
Cap. CCXLII 517
Cap. CCXLIII 524
Cap. CCXLIV 528
Cap. CCXLV 535
Cap. CCXLVI 543
Cap. CCXLVII 551
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