Controversies around the location of the United States capital and the material production of the territory: proposed association of territorial dynamics to the theory of systemic cycles of accumulation

• Grant number: 22/15303-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: April 15, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa
• Grantee: Larissa Alves de Lira
• Supervisor: François Furstenberg
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Johns Hopkins University (JHU), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/05637-0 - Marine or countryside? Madrid, Wasthington, Brasília and the controversies on the logic behind their placement: colonization and development of territories in a geo-history of the capitalist world-economy, BP.PD

Abstract

The US Congress debated in depth the problem of where to place the country's capital in October 1783, December 1784, and September 1789. Specific geographical factors were associated to each option, forming geographical systems. Each geographical system was attached to certain national tasks and expectations on systemic positions. In the period studied in this project, the United States goes through a process of transition from the periphery to the center of the world-system in a progressive consolidation between the end of the eighteenth century and the twentieth century. This also created internal tensions. The choice of the capital (1783-1789) is part of the initial stages in this transition, before the Civil War (1861-1865), an example of said tensions. This project has empirical, theoretical, and cartographical goals. Empirically, it aims to verify how different candidates for the capital of the United States represented different national projects, geographical factors of territorial development forming geographical systems, and types of urban networks in the eighteenth century. After the choice of capital and the Civil War, the territory's material production still had to be evaluated. This meant watching the evolution of geographical factors associated to Washington in a process of urban and territorial competition in the long term - in other words, between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Despite the theoretical breadth of the project, primary sources are well defined: registries of the debate in the Congress and governmental reports of the geographical and economic evolution of Washington and surrounding region. Our theoretical objective is to verify that, despite controversies and the choice of one of the geographical systems for the capital, the geographical factors of other proposals which were defeated through political forces remain. Therefore, different strategies in competition for producing the territory could be understood as a geographical dynamic belonging to the systemic cycles of accumulation described by Giovanni Arrighi. Finally, from a cartographical perspective we propose the construction of graphical models. Results must contemplate the empirical, theoretical, and cartographical objectives. (AU)