Rudi Batzell is a nineteenth-century historian of political economy, state-formation, and the US in the world.  His dissertation,
“Reconstructing Global Capitalism: Class, Corporations, and the Rise of Welfare States, 1870-1930,” examines the political
economy of inequality and state formation through a study of four cities in the U.S. and the U.K.: Pittsburgh, Sheffield, Baltimore, and Liverpool.  In this study, Batzell moves beyond the functionalist paradigms of capitalism and state-formation to explore
structures of inequality at all levels, exposing the essential connections between business practices, family and gender relations,
networks of sociability, and forms of collective action, as well as state fiscal structures and large-scale political alignments.