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Info page for book:   Alternative Tracks
Info page for book:   Alternative Tracks
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Alternative Tracks

The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917

Gerald Berk

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A novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States, focusing on the critical case of railroads.

Winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize from the American Political Science Association

Alternative Tracks provides a novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States. Focusing on the critical case of railroads, Gerald Berk shows that alternative forms of economic organization and governmental regulation existed in the late nineteenth century. Constitutional choices, not technological imperatives or economic interests...

A novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States, focusing on the critical case of railroads.

Winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize from the American Political Science Association

Alternative Tracks provides a novel interpretation of industrialization and political development in the United States. Focusing on the critical case of railroads, Gerald Berk shows that alternative forms of economic organization and governmental regulation existed in the late nineteenth century. Constitutional choices, not technological imperatives or economic interests, determined the outcome in the twentieth century: a centralized industry regulated according to liberal principles of redistribution. Alternative Tracks reveals a nineteenth-century rival to this political economy—an equally efficient and more democratic system of regional railroads regulated according to republican principles.

Reviews

Reviews

A lean but provocative, timely, insightful, and forcefully written challenge to the conventional wisdom about industrial America's political economy.

[A] model of sophisticated social science history... Berk forcefully rebuts the assumption found in nearly all historical accounts that the railroad structure that developed was inevitable... As effectively as anyone has, he makes a formidable case that it could have been otherwise.

Berk has offered some powerful questions for future scholars to keep in mind, and no student of railroad history or the history of business can afford to overlook this book.

An ambitious effort to make sense of how the modern American state was fashioned.

Berk's concise volume... provides a reinterpretation along corporate liberal lines of the factors leading to the rise of the great interregional railroad systems in America during latter half of the nineteenth century.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x
8.5
Pages
256
ISBN
9780801856365
Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Gerald Berk

Gerald Berk is associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon.