| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia. By Andrew M. Schocket. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. xiii, 274 pp. Illustrations, notes, works cited, index. $42.)

All politics is local. As Andrew Schocket demonstrates in Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia, the debate over the creation of corporations in the wake of the American Revolution had less to do with deeply held ideological beliefs than with individual and local self-interest—despite the rhetoric employed by both the proponents and opponents of incorporation. Throughout Schocket's study of the major early corporate entities in Philadelphia and its environs, constantly shifting factions of politicians, merchants, and entrepreneurs—as well as the average citizen—might denounce the incorporation of banks, canals, waterworks, and municipalities as antirepublican vestiges of the colonial era that granted monopoly privileges to a select few. And yet, when people desired greater access to cash and capital than private individuals could provide, when the state legislature was too regionally factionalized to construct internal improvements to help Pennsylvania compete with New York and Maryland, and when the city government failed to address the health hazards of a contaminated water supply, these same Philadelphians looked to corporations for a solution.

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