Neo-Mercantilism in Practice: State Chartered Railroads, Imagined Futures, and the Creation of a Settler-Society in the Red River Valley of the North, 1845-1890

Economic sociologists, drawing both on pragmatist action theory and Keynesian and Schumpeterian economics, have recently begun to look at the important work projection plays in economic action, especially under conditions of radical uncertainty. In this thesis I apply this framework to historical political economy, the rapid post-Civil War settlement of the American West by transcontinental railroads. I use the Red River Valley of the North, an extremely fertile region on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, as a case study, examining the imaginaries of the Valley projected by two railroads, the Northern Pacific and the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba, and how they shaped the creation of a local agriculture based settler society. I argue that this led to two types of developmental processes, those based upon rough consensus over imagined futures, which applied to the construction of a network of towns and various attempts to attract settlers, and those based upon disagreement over imagined futures, which applied mainly to agricultural practices, and broader concept of the ultimate economic function of a given railroad. The former processes were gradual, acting according to an overarching logic established at the beginning of settlement. The latter, in contrast, was an "eventful", personality driven process of disjunctive "creative destruction." Finally, I argue that these points of conflict and consensus reflected similar points within broader social, political, and railroad discourses.