PERSON
Alexander Hamilton
American statesman (1755–1804), first US Treasury Secretary, and author of the 1791 Report on Manufactures whose program of infant industry protection became the template for American industrial policy and the founding document of strategic state-led development.
Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was the first Treasury Secretary of the United States and the principal architect of the country's early economic institutions. His Report on the Subject of Manufactures (1791) laid out a comprehensive program for American industrial development through tariffs, subsidies, infrastructure investment, and patent protection — a program Chang invokes repeatedly as the founding document of the strategic state-led development model the United States now denies legitimacy to others. Hamilton's broader contribution included the establishment of the First Bank of the United States, the federal assumption of state debts, and the creation of a national customs service. His economic philosophy was explicitly mercantilist and developmentalist, drawing on the British example of Walpole's industrial policies and providing the intellectual foundation for the protectionist policies that the United States pursued for the next century. Hamilton's reputation has been resurrected in popular culture through Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 musical, but his specific economic doctrine remains largely unacknowledged in contemporary American policy discourse.
