More prize and award news from last week's meeting of the American Society for Legal History: This year's
John Phillip Reid Book Award went to
Max M. Edling (King's College, London), for
A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
About the award:
Named for John Phillip Reid, the prolific legal historian and founding
member of the Society, and made possible by the generous contributions
of his friends and colleagues, the John Phillip Reid Book Award is an
annual award for the best monograph by a mid-career or senior scholar,
published in English in any of the fields defined broadly as
Anglo-American legal history. The award is given on the recommendation
of the Society's Committee on the John Phillip Reid Book Award.
Via
H-Law, we have the official citation:
Edling’s marvelously insightful book explains the legal, political, and
economic foundations of the early republic’s ability to tax, borrow
money, wage war, and increase its territory. Edling shows that debt
following independence and the pressing need to raise money in a more
effective manner than possible under the Articles of Confederation
shaped constitutional design and, specifically, the tax power. His
contributions go well beyond legal history per se. Historians of Europe
and historical sociologists have long argued that “war made the
state.” Edling expertly applies this research tradition to the United
States between the Revolution and the Civil War as the new nation
developed a more robust state. He explains that the United States by
virtue of its geographic advantages faced lower security costs than the
European powers, so it did not need to remain constantly on a war
footing. Yet, crucially, it constructed in 1787-91 a tax-collecting and
borrowing capacity similar in operations and legitimacy to that of
Britain. This combination helps explain how the United States could
repeatedly expand its territory and wage the Civil War to a successful
conclusion. Edling makes very good use of comparative history. He
contrasts the financial burdens, resources, and trend lines in the
United States with those of Great Britain, Continental European powers,
and Mexico. As he does so, he is attentive to the particularities of
the United States’ situation: for instance, state’s rights ideology,
which acted as an ideological and institutional constraint on federal
fiscal authority. Deeply researched, marrying quantitative analysis
with institutional history, alert to micro-level political strategizing,
Edling’s work will be required reading not only in legal history, but
in a number of other fields: foreign relations, comparative
state-building, and the histories of taxation, military affairs,
imperialism, and westward expansion.
The members of the this year's Reid Book Award committee were Richard J. Ross
(University of Illinois) [chair],
Deborah Dinner (Emory University), Catherine
Fisk (University
of California, Irvine), Nicholas Parrillo (Yale), and Brad Snyder (University of Wisconsin).
