Papers presented by Kimberly Kracman since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Imperial-Military Origins of the Large Corporation: How the Department of War Helped Build the First U.S. Railroads"

Abstract:

In his classic exposition of the origins and characteristics of the large corporation, economic historian Alfred Chandler identified the railway industry as the birthplace of modern management in the United States. In this article, I argue that white racist violence exercised by the U.S. military in the nineteenth century provided not only the starting capital but also the organizational template for the modern U.S. corporation. Where Chandler locates the origin of the modern corporation in the railways of the 1840s and 1850s, I build on existing research by historians of the U.S. military to show that the organizational form that Chandler describes: a multi-unit enterprise coordinated by career managers via a centralized administrative hierarchy of responsibility and control, was developed by military leadership decades earlier, in the course of the state’s racist expropriation of Indigenous land and Black labor, and brought to the railroads by Army engineers. All the characteristic coordination mechanisms of the corporation: staff and line hierarchies, divisional and departmental structure, and bureaucratic systems of information gathering, surveillance, and control, were developed by the state for the purpose of more efficient racialized violence production. The U.S. military predated both textile mills and railroads in the implementation of sophisticated bureaucracies and in the externalization of costs onto racialized workers and communities.

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