In 1765, as part of a series of economic and political reforms implemented by the Spanish Bourbons in their American colonies, the tobacco trade of colonial Mexico was monopolized and its management placed in the hands of royal bureaucrats. By the 1790s, Mexico's tobacco monopoly was one of the largest organized industries in colonial Mexico (along with silver mining and textiles) and employed almost 20,000 individuals. In fiscal terms, tobacco revenues were second only to the silver tithe as the most valuable source of government income and accounted for almost one-fifth of total state revenues at the peak of its production. Its organization approximated a vertically integrated industry: Production and supply of tobacco leaf was regulated through a series of contracts that determined who produced tobacco, how much they produced, the prices paid for it, and where it was to be grown. The reorganization of the tobacco trade under Bourbon management resulted in the restriction of tobacco production to one small specific geographical area in southeastern Mexico: the two small villas of Orizaba and Córdoba in the modern-day state of Veracruz. The tobacco produced, in turn, was manufactured into cigarettes and cigars in six state-managed tobacco manufactories, the largest located in Mexico City, the political and commercial capital. Monopoly goods were marketed through government licensed stores throughout Mexico. Private trading and manufacture in tobacco goods became an illegal offense. Compliance with such regulations was enforced by a military corps employed by the monopoly administration, although contraband trade of tobacco was never eliminated.

Study of the origins of public policy has achieved an important place among historical scholars. For instance, historians have published many valuable studies explaining the origins of regulatory agencies in industries such as natural resources, energy, and transportation, including the origins of agencies responsible for enforcing safety standards. Scholars have treated road construction, the subject of this article, in a similar fashion, seeking to comprehend the principal factors informing the origins of state and federal road building programs. Not surprisingly, then, scholarly examinations of the Interstate Highway System, which exercised such a remarkable influence on the economy, as well as on the social and physical landscapes of the nation, have remained focused on explications of the origins of policy.Perhaps this particular preoccupation has been due to what historians Peter N. Stearns and Joel A. Tarr have identified as a tendency to equate policy origins with “a policy message.” But Stearns and Tarr contend that studies of “origins do not carry such an inherent message and subsequent stages of policy development must also be explored. “

Students of American corporate political behavior have long asked whether or not the corporate sector acts collectively to influence the public policy process. Corporate concentration of wealth in the late nineteenth century first suggested particular business interests enjoyed a privileged political position. After World War II American pluralists, while conceding that economic concentration posed a threat to democracy, noted that economic concentration could not be translated into political privilege without a high degree of corporate political unity. In this respect, they reasoned that big business was unlikely to engage in collective action because of the divisive nature of economic competition. For a long while, this optimism about the market's policing powers assuaged most fears of corporate political domination, even though several scholars offered contrary evidence. The recent corporate political mobilization, however, has renewed the debate on corporate political unity.

Administrative law in the United States during the last half century has been dominated by three major themes: (1) the extent to which legislative authority may be delegated to administrative agencies, (2) judicial review of legislative action, and (3) analysis of the formal aspects of agency procedures. At the core of this traditional approach to administrative law—defining its purpose—is the problem of the legitimacy of public administration. Specifically, the issue, to traditionalists, is how far administrative agencies can go before they impinge on the rights of private citizens.

In 1962 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., published an important book about suburbanization in late nineteenth-century Boston. Like most influential books, it was timely in its subject, and Warner's scholarly study might be supposed to have built upon the interest that was being generated by numerous popular analyses of contemporary suburbanization and suburban life in post—World War II America. One can indeed find in Streetcar Suburbs the same fundamental preoccupation with the shallowness of communal life and similar diagnoses of the sprawl of single-family homes in homogeneous and militantly residential areas on the periphery of the city, as one finds in say, William H. Whyte's 1956 critique, The Organization Man.' Yet Warner's book was not part of, and did not initiate, a new genre of historical suburban studies. Instead, it served as one of the essential founding texts of what came to be known as the “new urban history”—a large number of scholarly attempts to examine the character and structure of life at the center of the developing big cities of industrializing America. Not the “crabgrass frontier” but the “urban frontier” defined the territory of historical adventure during the 1960s. The metaphor is not, and was not then, entirely an academic one. In 1961 the new President of the United States had called for a “new frontier” of public initiative, and planner Charles Abrams helped his immediate successor expand and locate that initiative with his book, The City Is the Frontier. Without entirely losing interest in the suburbs, scholars, policymakers, and citizens of various kinds suddenly realized the importance of understanding the city and its history.