Nicholas Parrillo's outstanding book is in dialogue with several fields: the history of American law, political economy, and the state. It will fundamentally change the way readers will think about each.

Parrillo's sprawling and densely researched study springs from a seemingly simple question: how did the American state compensate its employees? However, the question has no simple answer. Parrillo identifies two compensation models between the American Revolution and the Second World War. The first, for much of the early nineteenth century, was defined by government employees who sought profits. The second, from the mid-to-late nineteenth century into the twentieth, will be more familiar to Parrillo's readers whereby government officers receive a fixed salary. Here, then, is a transformation of the American system of governmental compensation from a profit motive to its “absence” (1).

This discovery of the transformation over time of how the government paid its employees would alone be cause for celebration among historians of American and comparative government. Despite the vast amount of outstanding scholarship on the state in American history, we continue to know precious little about the relationship between the stewards of government and the officeholders whose practices put the wheels of government in motion. This is particularly so for the earlier period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. By focusing on how the problem of compensation framed the relationship between the nation's capital and officers at the nation's peripheries, Parrillo's book undoubtedly supplants increasingly dusty works on administrative history by scholars such as Leonard White and Carl Prince, but this contribution is only the outermost valence of a book that seeks for its readers to confront the incredibly complex and messy realities of governance in the American long nineteenth century.

Parrillo's second major contribution in Against the Profit Motive is to reintroduce governmental employees to the story of nineteenth-century political economy and capitalism. Although Parrillo did not set out to write a labor history from the standpoint of government workers, he has nonetheless provided us with a synoptic explanation of what these employees did, why they thought their work to be important, and what they expected in terms of remuneration. The book teems with the crises suffered by clerks, tax collectors, custom house men, jailers, veterans, land claimants, special agents, United States attorneys, and seamen, among others. A fine example of the richness of Parrillo's findings is his discussion of federal prosecutors, about whom little is known. Until the late nineteenth century, he argues, Congress used cash bounties as an incentive for federal prosecutors to take on violators of alcohol excises, because those prosecutions ran far afoul of local “norms” (257). The result was that prosecutors, unable to pursue criminals protected by local public opinion but in need of making a living, targeted small moonshine vendors. Congress introduced the salary in the 1880s to allow prosecutors “forbearance” toward petty offenders (278). Federal prosecutors, long since understood as “alien imposers” of a distant and foreign law, would thus be better integrated into the communities in which they lived. For Parrillo, then, the daily activities of federal prosecutors should be understood less as a narrow question of excise finance or the rule of law and more within an ideological movement to reconstruct “trust and legitimacy for the federal government” (285).

The book also challenges the widely accepted view that the American state moved from a diminutive state of “courts and parties” in the early nineteenth century toward a modern administrative state because of civil service reform and bureaucratization. Parrillo tantalizingly hints that the persistence of this view conveniently affirms the supposed progress and sophistication of contemporary statism, but he more explicitly argues and persuades through the “salary revolution” that the transformation of American governance occurred “independent of bureaucratization” (359). Political culture, political economy, and local–national tensions were far more important in this transformation than any teleological ideological drive toward a Weberian ideal type of bureaucracy.

There is little to find fault with in Parrillo's magisterial book. Scholars for generations to come will return to Against the Profit Motive as the definitive account of government compensation in much the same way as legal historians consult comparable volumes on common law, police powers, and institutions, by William W. Nelson, William J. Novak, and Richard R. John. However, Parrillo's style is far more analytical and far less narrative driven than many legal histories by his peers, and some readers will find it challenging to stick with his argument through a dazzling array of evidence. Here the structure of the book is helpful, though, because Parrillo includes a crystal clear introductory segment laying out his argument, and uses the beginning and end of each chapter to remind readers of where they have been, and where they shall journey. The result is a book that is and will be for many years among the finest histories of American governance and statecraft.