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¹³ According to Dickinson, the authorities toyed briefly with what we would now call privatization in 1368, when they granted a ten-year lease to a private operator. But the mayor and the commonalty quickly “repented of their ill-doing” and issued no further such leases.

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⁴⁹ Ibid., 47–50.

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⁵⁹ The resemblance of the Philadelphia scheme to the Southwark system was suggested by Jane Mork Gibson, a long-serving historian at the Philadelphia Water Department. For the plan itself, see “View of the Practicability and Means of Supplying the City of Philadelphia with Wholesome Water,” letter from B. Henry Latrobe to John Miller, 29 Dec. 1798 (Philadelphia, 1799), Philadelphia Water Department Archives.

⁶⁰ Report to the Select and Common Councils on the Progress and State of the Water Works, Watering Committee, 24 Nov. 1799, Philadelphia Water Department Archives.

⁶¹ See Report of the Committee for the Introduction of Wholesome Water into the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1801), 13, Philadelphia Water Department Archives.

⁶² Yellow fever still periodically visited Philadelphia, but never again with the vengeance that had characterized its plagues in the last years of the eighteenth century. See Powell, J. H., Bring Out Your Dead: The Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia, 1949), 282.Google Scholar

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⁸⁰ This question has long aroused interest among economists, political scientists, and historians. Key works include Wilcox, Delos F., Municipal Franchises: A Description of the Terms and Conditions upon which Private Corporations Enjoy Special Privileges in the Streets of American Cities, vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y., 1910)Google Scholar; and Priest, George L., “The Origins of Utility Regulation and the ‘Theories of Regulation’ Debate,” Journal of Law and Econom ics 36 (Apr. 1993): 289–323.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁸⁶ In 1843, for instance, nearly half the total debt of U.S. cities was held by New York City alone. See Mulhouse, A. M., Municipal Bonds: A Century of Experience (New York, 1936), esp. table 12, p. 33.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ For a discussion of the evolution of municipal bonds, see Mulhouse, Municipal Bonds; and Griffith, Ernest S., History of American City Government: The Progressive Years and Their Aftermath, 1900–1920 (New York, 1974).Google Scholar For an analysis of earlier problems with state-raised debt, see Arthur Grinath III, John Joseph Wallis, and Richard E. Sylla, “Debt, Default and Revenue Structure: The American State Debt Crisis in the Early 1840s,” NBER Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, Mar. 1997. For developments in the United Kingdom, see Falkus, , “The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century,” 134–61.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Cutler, David and Miller, Grant, “Water, Water, Everywhere: Municipal Finance and Water Supply in American Cities,” NBER, Mar. 2005Google Scholar, table 1.

⁸⁹ One could argue that the turning point actually began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, especially if one focuses on urban areas of Britain outside of London. For representative data, see Hassan, , “The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century,” 531–47Google Scholar; and Falkus, , “The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century,” 134–61.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Indeed, Trentmann and Taylor argue that tap water was essentially the first consumer good. See Trentmann, Frank and Taylor, Vanessa, “From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in Nineteenth-Century London,” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Trentmann, Frank (Oxford, 2006), 53–79.Google Scholar