In order to facilitate commercial transactions and economic investment after the American Revolution, many inhabitants of northern Virginia became convinced that the region needed financial institutions. Indeed, most politically active residents of the region—at least after the 1790s—saw banks as crucial agents of economic development. Thus, the philosophy of “agrarian republicans” such as Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Carolina—who saw banks as monopolistic and anti-republican institutions—had limited appeal in the region. Moreover, the banks of northern Virginia were not controlled by planters who sought capital to finance the purchase of slaves and land. Instead, banks supported a wide range of economic endeavors—agriculture, industry, internal improvement projects, and commercial activities. The broadening access to bank capital in northern Virginia reveals that in the South—as in the northern states—there was a “democratization” of banking in the years after Revolution.

Unlike most contemporary New England banks, early commercial banks of the Middle Atlantic region were widely owned and frequently traded corporations. They lent to a broad segment of the business community, including artisans, farmers, and women. Banks lent widely, first, because their large capitalization made it difficult for a few privileged insiders to control a substantial percentage of loanable funds and, second, because banks were able to acquire reliable credit information on a variety of customers in an efficient manner. As a result, small enterprises had access to bank credit.

This article recounts the birth of the clothing industry in the United States after 1815. It contends, in contrast to recent historical literature, that the clothing business was at the center of the American experience of industrialization. This was not because ready-made clothing was a novel commodity. Nor was it because of new production technologies, social innovations, or legal structures adopted by the industry. Rather, clothing entrepreneurs were significant because they integrated several important markets—a trans-Atlantic trade in cloth, an urban trade in labor, and a market for manufactured goods in the interior regions of the United States. This helped to make the ready-made clothing business among the country's largest industries by 1850.

By building retail and wholesale market halls in the 1880s, the city of Berlin rationalized the distribution of food while maintaining public control of commerce. In designing the market hall system, technological improvement and public orderliness emerged as top priorities, while the interests of consumers and small retail dealers who had relied on the traditional outdoor public markets remained secondary. The emphasis on order reflected the interests of the city's economic and cultural elite, the Bürgertum, who sought to make Berlin fit their image of a world-class city.