NINETEENTH CENTURY

My dissertation examines how the financial sector, specifically banks, achieved open entry in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts. The first chapter introduces this question and provides the historical background and conceptual framework necessary for unpacking this question. The second chapter provides new evidence showing how the majority political party, the Federalists, held a monopoly on banks by dominating the state legislature in charge of issuing charters for new banks, effectively prohibiting members of the opposing political party, the Democratic-Republicans, from opening banks. Political turnover in the period between 1810 and 1812 destroyed the Federalist monopoly and allowed for the possibility of open entry in the banking sector. The third chapter provides a new measurement of an elite coalition by collecting original data about bank directors and state legislators in an effort to identify their relationship. The empirical results show how the political composition of the banking sector changed during the Federalist and the Democratic-Republican eras and how the banking sector became less connected to political elites (i.e. the legislators) in the 1830s – 1850s. The fourth chapter shows that for peopl