Incorporating a Community: Civil Society, Legal Incorporation, and Place in the West, 1863-1909

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Contingency and Particularity

Abstract

Few changes have been as dramatic for U.S. economic, political, and social life than the policies governing corporations in the mid-19th century. Prior, charitable organizations were a plurality of incorporated organizations. But after mid-century, the scholarship on civil society organization incorporation is scarce. This is the case even though lowering barriers to civil society incorporation was an impetus for the policy development. In this paper I ask, what happened to civil society organization incorporations after the Civil War? In doing so, I theorize that civil society incorporation took on an intertwined meaning with place. I digitized data on county-level incorporation from Portland, Los Angeles, and Seattle on the 2,459 civil society and the 15,108 for-profit corporations founded after the Civil War. From this view, the oft-heralded growth of civil society in the late 19th century appears anemic. Place proves to be the best predictor of incorporation. Differences in civil society incorporation emerge between counties revealing important differences across place. One commonality is the robustness of ethnic organization incorporation, particularly of Black and Asian communities. New incorporation laws gave these communities an opportunity to establish themselves in the growing cities.

Author

• Simon Yamawaki Shachter, University of Connecticut