Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic

Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic is a fundamental reinterpretation of law and politics in America between 1790 and 1850, the crucial period of the Republic's early growth and its movement toward industrialism. The book is the most detailed study yet available of the intellectual and institutional processes that created the foundation categories framing all the basic legal relationships involving working people at work. But it also brings out the political and social significance of those categories, and of law's role in their creation. Tomlins argues that it is impossible to understand outcomes in the interaction between law and labor during the early Republic unless one also understands the pre-eminence that legal discourse was assuming at the time in American society as a whole, and the particular social and political reasons for that pre-eminence. Because of the breadth and novelty of its interpretation this is a book not just for those interested in the history of law or the history of labor, but for anyone interested in the broadstream of American political and social history.