Creating the Public Domain: Nineteenth-Century Local State Formation in Britain and the United States

To understand the origins of modern local governing institutions in Britain and the United States, this article examines how the forces of nineteenth-century urbanization, industrial and commercial development, nation-state consolidation, and democratization converged to form a historical context ripe for creating a public domain through a process of local state formation. The comparative-historical study also takes into account the role of political mobilization in the creation of the public domain by demonstrating that the formation of modern local state entailed highly contested political processes that produced uneven local state development between and within the two nations.