Anders Bright is a seventh year PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2025/2026 academic year, he will be a recipient of the Henry Kaufman Financial History Postdoc from the Business History Conference. His dissertation—Luck’s Republic: Lotteries, Class, and the Emergence of American Financial Capitalism (1760-1860)—provides a bottom-up account of the United States’ transition to financial capitalism, told through the lens of its most wdiespread but forgotten financial institution: the lottery.
Luck’s Republic asks how— in less than a lifetime— lotteries evolved from a respectable form of local capital mobilization associated with elites like George Washington, into a fraudulent nation-spanning industry, operated by men like P.T. Barnum. Through answering this question, it argues that the country’s early financial system generated two developments, that mirror the workings of financial capitalism in our own day: rapid economic growth, and deepening wealth inequality. Lotteries profited from these two trends by exploiting the gulf between the egalitarian promises associated with economic expansion and market integration, and the precarious economic conditions many Americans found themselves in. Everyone stood equal before fortune’s merry wheel, as they purportedly did before the market. If the majority remained losers, at least they were free to take the chance.
Luck’s Republic focuses on a forgotten financial institution, and, fittingly, its pages are populated by people largely ignored by financial historians. Enslaved people who purchased their freedom after winning the lottery; Cherokee and Muskogee families who saw their lands confiscated through vast land lotteries; poor immigrants who purchased lottery tickets as a last-ditch effort to keep their heads above water; and the hundreds-of thousands of other—largely faceless—Americans who played the lottery prior to the Civil War. Though the multitudes purchased tickets for a multitude of reasons, Luck’s Republic argues that an analysis of the supply and demand for American lottery tickets over the longue durée brings into sharper focus the contours of the country’s emergent financial capitalism.
Anders has two forthcoming articles stemming from his dissertation work, one in the journal, Labor: Studies in Working Class History (December 2025) and another in the journal, Early American Studies (February 2026). His work has also appeared in more popular outlets including the Washington Post, and as founding host of Penn Press’s Early American Conversations podcast. He has received funding from the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the New York Historical Society, among others.
Anders received a B.A. in 2018 from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied History and Political Science.