This dissertation puts land at the center of the American state formation to analyze the emergence of the American administrative and developmental state. As the first nation to emerge from revolt against colonial rule, in the United States empire and republicanism collided to produce a settlers’ republic. Therein, it was through the work of acquiring, surveying, and selling land; promoting infrastructure projects such as canals and railways; and managing western territories that a people wary of centralized authority paradoxically found themselves building an expansive, bureaucratized, and increasingly developmental American state. Significantly, with so much of the activity of the early American state directed towards the acquisition, settlement, and incorporation of land, territory emerged as the orienting object of government. Territory was reimagined a space to be governed—to be improved, economized, and developed in the nation’s interest. It was in pursuing settlers’ visions of an empire for liberty that early Americans found themselves building the administrative institutions and ways of relating government to territory, economy, and society now pervasive in today’s nation-states.

I make this argument in a series of studies. In the first, I construct a novel dataset characterizing antebellum Congressional debate activity from 1789 to 1861 (N=12,658), to demonstrate that the majority of early Congressional activity was concerned with acquiring, defending, and transforming land. Theorizing this centrality of land requires considering how modern state formation involved not only the expansion and bureaucratization of state administrative capacities, but also a transition from expansive empires of difference to territorially, economically, and socially contiguous nation-states. In the United States, this transition occurred via settler colonial practices of territorial incorporation such as, in the antebellum period, the integration of new states on equal political footing, and the construction of transportation and communication infrastructures.

In the second study, I examine the period in the United States before it was taken-for-granted that government should promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways to stimulate what is now called economic development. I demonstrate how the public lands—the broad swathes of land in the national domain for which title had not been transferred to private owners—were repeatedly called upon as a fiscal resource, thereby allowing early American state builders the flexibility to experiment with various institutional arrangements and new governmental rationalities to justify government support of infrastructures. Crucially, to mobilize the public lands in this way, early American state builders relied on assumptions of Native dispossession and erasure. These assumptions lowered the perceived costs of mobilizing the public lands as a fiscal resource, and institutionalized processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development.

In a third study, I analyze the legislative debates leading up to the authorization of the first transcontinental railroad as a window into how federalism complicated territorial expansion and development. I theorize federalism as the outgrowth of empire to demonstrate how federalism territorialized understandings of sovereignty, thereby rendering decisions over territorial expansion and development politically destabilizing in ways that they would not be under empire. I analyze the debates leading up to the passage of the 1862 Pacific Railway Act to examine how federalism complicated territorial development in practice. The fact that the railroad could not be approved until after the outbreak of the Civil War, which removed Southern sectional interests from Congress, illustrates the limitations of federalist systems to make decisions over land. Because federalism allows legislators to sidestep conflict by excluding dissenting positions via the re-drawing or strategic selection of political boundaries, federalism does not incentivize meaningful compromise over questions of territorial development.

I conclude by sketching the evolution of the United States’ settler political economy. I discuss how the various efforts to manage land examined in detail above were situated in the United States’ evolving land policy, administrative capacities, and governmental rationalities. From the General Land Office to the Department of Interior, it was to meet the demands of managing vast territories that some of the United States’ earliest and most technocratic administrative agencies were established. And it was from the bird’s eye view of those agencies that early American state builders experimented with ways of promoting and optimizing public welfare using land policy that echo the economizing reasoning of today.

Analyzing the United States as a settlers’ republic makes visible the trade-offs and exclusions constitutive of American state formation and establishes the central role that land played in American political and economic development. By doing so, this dissertation points to the horizon needing to be transformed therein to perfect democratic government and reimagine relationships between land, government, and people more generally.

It is tempting to treat privacy either as an anti-social idea that separates people from social life — thus placing it towards the fringe of sociological scholarship — or as a historical anachronism that can scarcely survive in the computational age. In this dissertation, I develop an alternative perspective that firmly anchors the study of privacy in the sociological tradition and historicizes the emergence of privacy as a salient political logic in the United States.

Focusing on the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, I use the tools of historical sociology and computational social science to investigate the gradual diffusion and uneven institutionalization of the logic of privacy, and I identify the consequences and socio-historical significance of this transformation for the organization of American society and the exercise of informational power. I develop my argument based on a multi-method analysis that combines two years of research in federal, state, and municipal archives with the analysis of census micro-data and digitized government records, a computational study of historical text, and a social network analysis of legal citation patterns.

An initial theoretical chapter lays the conceptual groundwork by distinguishing the dichotomization of public and private from the historically contingent constitution of privacy; and it outlines three sociological anchors of my argument: To study privacy as an emerging political logic suggests an analytical focus on episodes of contestation, on the practices of institutions and institutional actors, and on the entanglement of privacy and informational power with moralized, gendered, and racialized conceptions of the social order. Four empirical chapters then analyze the diffusion and institutionalization of privacy in empirically distinct theaters of world-making, focusing respectively on U.S. public discourse, urban reform movements and municipal legislation during the Progressive Era, American jurisprudence about the “right to privacy”, and privacy governance within the expanding bureaucratic state.

1 I show (1) that the language of privacy carried a relatively stable meaning but gradually diffused into new domains of public discourse as it was applied to emerging social problems and invoked to comprehend and contest new technologies; (2) that tenement reform advocates incorporated demands for privacy into their political agenda and exploited local political opportunity structures to prevail in legislative battles, encoding a distinctly middle-class conception of familial privacy in tenement regulation and in the urban architecture of working-class neighborhoods; (3) that the right to privacy first gained a foothold in U.S. jurisprudence as an attempt to reign in the collection of personal information by non-state actors, but that it was ultimately consecrated by federal courts as a state-centric and constitutionally-grounded right after two decades of intra-judicial interpretive struggles over legal meaning and precedent; and (4) that the many-handed American state relied on a complex patchwork of exceptions to make the exercise of informational power compatible with expectations of — and institutional commitments to — privacy, thereby producing an uneven landscape of legibility that left some types of information and some populations uniquely exposed to the official gaze. As I show in the conclusion, legal codification and organizational path dependencies have allowed some of these historical changes to cast a shadow into the present day.

Each chapter yields historically bounded and empirically grounded conclusions about the diffusion and institutionalization of privacy as a political logic that remain attuned to the exigencies of specific situations and institutional circumstance. Collectively, they draw attention to the years between 1870 and 1930 as a period of transformative change that elevated the salience and social significance of privacy within the institutional infrastructure of American society. They document processes of institutionalization that settled struggles in the political domain and insulated political priorities against recurring challenges; they demonstrate the encoding of moral imaginaries and political ideologies in the language of spatial and informational privacy; they identify the routine use of exceptions as a central feature of bureaucratic rule and an important dimension of the uneven development of the so-called “new American state”; and they draw attention to the partial and selective application of privacy to a diverse populace.

This has several larger implications for the study of privacy and informational power. First, I add to an evolving sociological literature that has begun to reclaim privacy from legal historians and moral philosophers, treating it as a proper object of sociological inquiry and linking it to long-standing sociological debates about power, inequality, and the self/society relationship. Second, I provide a corrective to accounts that treat privacy norms as a straightforward expression of technological circumstance and lament the death of privacy in the twenty-first century. Third, I stake an analytical claim about the contextuality of privacy and the benefits of middle-range inquiry. Instead of searching for universal definitions or shared essences, sociologists can study the piecemeal constitution of abstract concepts (like privacy) in specific settings, focusing on the micro-social foundations of macro-social trends and on the amalgamation and sublimation through which varied discourses and proto-boundaries are assembled into a minimally coherent whole.

This dissertation applies quantitative methods to the study of how race and ethnicity are socially constructed in quantitative research. This reflexive application of method reveals the contribution to constructionist theory that is possible from thoughtfully applied quantitative reasoning. In part, this contribution is the elaboration of the specific ways in which racial and ethnic data are constructed, providing details to the broad constructionist rhetoric that has been critiqued for being overly grand and substantively shallow. The dissertation suggests that both theory and method can be improved through the integration of both - by demonstrating how quantitative methods can incorporate constructionist perspectives while also demonstrating specific ways in which race and ethnicity data are constructed.

The first substantive chapter tackles racial identification in survey interviews, demonstrating that complexities of specific interactions can shape how individuals identify their own race, revealing the many ambiguities present when relying on a single identification in a survey. The second chapter describes how missing responses are filled in, producing an apparent universality of racial self-identification in the decennial census and American Community Survey. By exploring the patterns in these allocations, this chapter demonstrates how statistical descriptions of communities are reliant upon decisions made by bureaucracies rather than simple aggregations of self-identifications. The final chapter explores the mathematical details of statistical models that have been applied to studying intersectional differences. This chapter reveals that the current gold-standard approaches, while well motivated, unintentionally incorporate assumptions which are anathema to their theoretical perspectives. Finally, the chapter suggests that the application of Gaussian Process models may have similarly favorable mathematical properties, while avoiding contradictory assumptions.

Why would a country that has erased Blackness from its national history suddenly begin to enact laws and policies targeting Afrodescendants, and what factors impact the approach that such a state takes to institutionalize Afrodescendant subjecthood? Which actors influence debates about how to legally define and delimit Afro-descent in countries where an Afrodescendant category did not exist previously? And what are the stakes of these state definitions for those who are seeking legal recognition as Afrodescendants for the first-time? In this dissertation, I focus on different sets of interactions and relationships to explain why Argentina and Chile – two states that stand out in Latin America for being particularly successful in establishing themselves as White enclaves – have taken different approaches when legally defining and delimiting Afro-descent.

The scope of the legislation and policies targeting Afrodescendants varies greatly between these two countries. While Argentine law has stressed the importance of ancestry and a broad notion of Afrodescendant culture, institutionalizing different types of Afrodescendant subjecthood, Chilean legislation has defined Afro-descent in relation to a particular history, culture, and identity connected to a long-standing presence in the national territory. Each of the empirical chapters of this dissertation contribute to explaining why Afro-descent has been institutionalized differently in Argentina and Chile by focusing on the interactions between distinct sets of actors that have participated in debates around how to recognize Afrodescendants.

My findings draw on research conducted over the course of four years, which included participant observation, archival data analysis, and 105 in-depth interviews with Afrodescendant activists, scholars, NGO representatives, international and multilateral organization agents, and state officials working at different levels of the Argentine and Chilean governments. From a processual perspective, I examine how the interaction between different sets of actors contributed to the formation of a political field – in dispute – around the recognition of Afrodescendant people. I analyze how, in a context of the international rise of multicultural norms and local ethno-racial revitalization, classification struggles over the meanings and boundaries of Afro-descent have evolved in each country. I particularly focus on the stakes and impacts of these political struggles for delimiting who is included or excluded as a subject of rights.

I identify five factors that together explain divergences between how Afro-Argentine and Afro-Chilean activists have framed Afro-descent and how the Argentine and Chilean states have responded to their claims and institutionalized Afrodescendant subjecthood: 1. Local activists’ access to and mobilization of transnational networks and international resources that can provide leverage in their negotiations with state officials; 2. Governments’ responses to the international commitments they make at intergovernmental forums and ratify through international conventions regarding the adoption of human rights and multicultural norms; 3. Afrodescendant movements’ location in relation to national geographies of power and the social relationships they therefore develop that impact how they draw boundaries of belonging; 4. Countries’ territorial organization of political power and the constraints and opportunities that different political systems afford for activists to access state officials and public institutions to promote ethno-racial reform; and 5. The role played by immigration in debates within Afrodescendant movements and between activists and state officials around who should be legally recognized as Afrodescendant. Overall, my research reveals how and why different definitions of Afro-descent are legally institutionalized, and how these definitions shape the type, impact, and intended beneficiaries of public policies.

My research has several implications for sociological understandings of how social categories get institutionalized. First, it reveals the central role played by activists in classification struggles around the definition, delimitation, and institutionalization of social categories. It shows how activists delimit boundaries of belonging contextually and strategically, depending on who they interact with and what claims they seek to make. Second, it reaffirms the persistence of the nation-state as the main source of symbolic authority to institutionalize these categories, both by legally defining who gets particular resources and by shaping how society at large perceives and classifies the world and each other. The research demonstrates, however, that the state’s symbolic power is not absolute and that there are ongoing struggles to impose new categories both within the state and by civil society actors. Finally, the research shows that the stakes of how social categories are legally defined and delimited are high for those struggling to be recognized, as the institutionalization of social categories reifies distinctions between groups by assigning opportunities and resources to some over others. At the same time, it reveals how hard it is for state policies to disrupt the racial/social hierarchies that activists pushing for them are trying to dispute and dismantle.

Why does authoritarianism sometimes prevail against the backdrop of a seemingly robust civil society? What are the organizational conditions under which collective action translates into political influence? In this dissertation, I use a prospective study of contemporary politics in Brazil to investigate these two questions. Individual chapters address related but more specific puzzles about how political parties, fractions of capital, social movements, and civil society organizations across the ideological spectrum wield (or attempt to wield) political power in times of rupture.

I conducted the research over a five-year period, two years of which were spent in the field, and employed a sequential mixed methods design. I draw on 221 interviews and secondary survey data to situate the study in historical perspective, and longitudinal network analysis to track the strategic interactions of 40 civil society groups as they attempted to build power in the face of a high-stakes presidential election and welfare state retrenchment.

I found that the political dominance of plutocrats, right-wing protesters, and Pentecostals in this historical moment in Brazil was intimately linked to a concomitant trend of atomization and depoliticization—or anti-politics—in progressive civic spaces. Well before Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, the organizational sinews that once characterized Brazil’s leftist, member-led, self-governing civil society groups had atrophied.

From these findings, I elaborate a theoretical model that helps explain civil society groups' differential ability to advance their interests via the state—that is, to act politically. I argue that their variable levels of influence can be understood as a function of three factors: 1) Their source of power, whether control over economic, judicial-bureaucratic, cultural, or civic resources; and 2) their organizational capacity, which I analyze by developing a general typology of atomized, corporatist, networked, and hierarchical structural forms. I argue that these two features subsequently influenced the 3) range of strategies to which different groups have access when responding to unexpected events—both setbacks and openings—as the political terrain shifts. The strong version of this claim is that structure generates strategy: whether, how, and the extent to which key civil society groups are organized helps explain the degree and kind of power that they wield, and therefore, the type of political regime that prevails in a nation-state.

The major implications of the study are twofold. First, I show that the organization and articulation processes that happen in the wake of critical events can be more consequential to the political balance of power than the events themselves. Organizing strategies (and lack thereof) critically affect the conditions that give rise to or protect against authoritarian politics. Second, I argue that although the case is coincident with a global right-wing tilt, political transformations like the transition from Lulismo to Bolsonarismo in Brazil are neither inexorable nor are they structurally determined. Instead, strategic actors—their contingency plans and their failures to contingency plan—must be central to any account of dramatic movements in the political terrain.

Brazil’s forest laws have typically been understood as a scientific response to the ecological destruction wrought by plantation agriculture. “Reproducing the Forest: Science, Agriculture, and Environmental Justice in Rural Rio de Janeiro” shows that they were also a liberal innovation in the face of a labor crisis produced by the abolition of slavery (1888), and a novel means of appropriating the social reproduction of freedpersons who supplied essential work and technological innovations to plantations. By framing freedpersons’ livelihoods as something “stolen” from the environment, environmental policies normalized wage work, sharecropping, and other forms of labor extraction, while simultaneously annexing social aspects of reproduction, including environments and forms of environmental knowledge that sustained commercial agriculture. This dissertation uses multiple methods from the social and environmental sciences to explore how agro-ecologies produced by sharecroppers on a former coffee plantation, converted into a pioneering model farm in the central Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro, became scientifically construed as “forests.” Employing soil samples, botanical surveys, archival research and oral histories, “Reproducing the Forest” demonstrates how diverse ways of knowing about these ostensibly natural environments imply different social histories, and different possible futures, for Brazil’s rural geographies. Recovering the social history of places presently legislated as forests can inform the larger political changes necessary to bring Brazil’s environmental laws in line with constitutional commitments to effect reparations for racialized dispossession and environmental injustice.