In Building the Empire State, Brian Phillips Murphy has written a monograph that will serve as an important landmark in the scholarship concerning the intersections of money and politics during the United States's first half-century. Taking part in the renewed interest in what many have called “new institutionalism”—that is, concentrating not on structures but on how formal and informal institutions actually worked in practice—Murphy details how what he calls “political entrepreneurs” either revised old institutions (e.g., corporations) or improvised new ones (e.g., New York State's Erie Canal Commission) to administer efforts to forward their political and economic fortunes in New York City, perhaps already the new nation's most energetic and innovative city. Murphy notes that the enterprising men whose machinations he has expertly unearthed and clearly explains were largely temporizing and practical, showing little interest in ideological arguments about precedents or ramifications. They were willing to try a variety of institutional arrangements to accomplish their ends, that is, pursuing their own business success through the delegation by the state legislature of the administration of major economic functions, among them banking and transportation.

Building the Empire State unfolds in a series of five chapter-length chronological case studies. “The Most Dangerous and Effectual Engine of Power” chronicles the jockeying of several factions of men as they strove to establish incorporated banks, only one of which was initially successful. At least that institution, the Bank of New York, endured, unlike the Northern and Western Inland Navigation Companies (NINC and WINC), which fell to the typical twin early-republic internal improvement challenges of technological obstacles and inadequate funding, as detailed in “An Enlarged American Scale.” In “A Very Convenient Instrument,” Murphy delves into the circumstances that Aaron Burr and his colleagues navigated in order to initiate a state-sanctioned bank through the institutional structure of the Manhattan Company, a corporation established ostensibly for the purpose of providing fresh water to New York City. Perhaps the two most original and intriguing chapters are the last. The historiography of Ogden v. Gibbons has generally portrayed as monolithic the monopoly broken up as a result of its majority opinion declaring the federal government supreme in the domain of interstate commerce—that of New York's exclusive grant to steamboat designer Robert Fulton and investor Robert Livingston for steam-powered navigation. But as Murphy insightfully points out in “To Occupy All Points,” New York's granting of that monopoly looked much stronger on paper than it did in operation, functioning more as an exclusive license that gave its owners leverage over but not necessarily a full prohibition against potential competitors. Finally, while previous historians have portrayed the Erie Canal as a wholly state project, Murphy argues in “If We Must Have a War or a Canal, I Am in Favor of a Canal” that its surveying, routing, construction, and financing structure necessarily involved what we might today call private or non-state actors, among them land company operatives and, eventually, private investors willing to provide capital that taxpayers would not.

Charting between the particular and the general presents the most difficult challenge of a case study, and for the most part, Building the Empire State moves adeptly among scales. Murphy deftly relays the stories of individual actors, like Aaron Burr, Robert Fulton, and Philip Schuyler, providing readers a sense of the complexity of their motivations. He also notes how many states adopted corporate banking in the 1780s and how the success of Massachusetts's Middlesex Canal in the 1810s helped spur New Yorkers to build the Erie Canal despite the failure of previous artificial navigation efforts in the state. Other contextualizations might have opened some interpretive possibilities and in fact might have been useful to readers in better demonstrating the applicability of Murphy's more specific arguments to analogous locales. Just as New Yorkers were working out how to use prevailing forms to fulfill new purposes, so were men (and, for better and worse, it was almost entirely men) in other states, and in Britain as well. For example, the NINC and WINC were part of an Anglo-American wave of incorporated canal and river-improvement companies, nearly all of which were spurred and dashed by similarly irrational hopes. And the Empire State's 1840s shift from a legislative process of incorporation to a bureaucratic one mirrored that of many other states for similar reasons, namely, a combination of the Panic of 1837 and the overextension of publicly financed internal improvements beyond what could be sustained given the prevailing economic activity.

Building the Empire State's greatest contribution is its demonstrating that the distinction historians have tended to draw between “public” and “private” is at best anachronistic and possibly obscures as much as it may reveal. Instead, Murphy asserts that political entrepreneurs moved seamlessly among various institutions, using what best suited them, and that all of those institutions were in some way sanctioned by the state and dependent upon its administrative and legal apparatus. Murphy upends Louis Hartz's characterization of early-republic “mixed enterprise” as the state's partnering with private interests to promote economic growth; for Murphy, political entrepreneurs pursued their projects for their own gains, with the state's economic growth as a positive by-product. This difference may come from a difference in sources—for Hartz, primarily legislative records; for Murphy, primarily the papers of men like Philip Schuyler. In addition, Murphy's insights gleaned from his role as not only an academic but also a contemporary political reporter have alerted him to the parallels between the early republic and today's political entrepreneurs. We live in an age in which hedge fund managers bankroll their own or others’ successful gubernatorial campaigns, politicos move seamlessly from congressional office to corporate boardroom, and trade association lobbyists draft legislation. Robert Livingston's career as New York chancellor, the Manhattan Company's largest initial stockholder, land speculator, steamboat impresario, and Canal Commissioner exemplified the kind of political entrepreneurship that Murphy has so skillfully unearthed. As the best works of history often do, Building the Empire State provokes as many questions as it asks and reveals the present no less than the past.