“Brilliantly researched and smartly argued, National Duties deploys prodigious research to construct a social history of governance in the early Republic. Rao gives us a methodological monument that will not be replicated for some time, connecting high fiscal policy to its implementation on the ground, and placing that contingent relationship in the broader social context of mob action and the cultural context of the British fiscal-military state on the one hand, and republican ideology on the other. Besides providing a methodological template for historians interested in governance and the law, regardless of site or time period, Rao’s approach yields a major substantive payoff. He argues persuasively that the great centralizer, Alexander Hamilton, was in fact instrumental in replicating a decentralized financial regime and it was Jefferson and Madison, so often portrayed as the protectors of state’s rights who shored up the plenary power of the national government.”

Brian Balogh, University of Virginia

“Rao’s elegantly written and deeply researched National Duties tells a remarkably important and unknown story: the central role that the custom house played in the creation of a strong American state. Using reams of little known material from the customs records in the National Archives, Rao shows how the early republic depended overwhelmingly on customs revenue to pay its debts, fund its wars, and finance governance. This dependence on overseas trade gave the merchants who plied that trade inordinate influence in shaping the contours of the American state. Rao demonstrates that in the wake of the Napoleonic wars James Monroe began to dismantle the old custom house system, which had continued many of the traditions of the British Empire. In so doing, Monroe did a great deal to create a truly national American state. Rao’s book both demonstrates the strength of the early American state and tells an important story about how the relationship between the state and merchant capital was transformed in the early Republic.”

Steven Pincus, Yale University

“In his engaging debut book, Rao examines the often overlooked story of customs houses from 1769 to 1828 and argues for their central significance in shaping the American federal government. More than simply providing the majority of revenues collected by the federal government during this period, customs houses and the evolving relationships they fostered among merchants, customs officials, and the US government shed light on how the American state explored its limits and found its identity by grappling with the realities of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic marketplace. . . . This is a welcome study that reveals the importance of customs houses in the creation of the federal government and its development through the Age of Jackson. Highly recommended.”

Choice

“Rao is an excellent legal historian. . .National Duties is a well-researched, well-written account of statebuilding, law, and commerce in the formative years of the young American republic. ”

Economic History