History 2980x Bibliography
Spring 2012
History of Capitalism Graduate Seminar
Department of History, Brown University
Professor Seth Rockman
Puneet Bhasin
Chu Shiu On
John Delea
Zachary Dorner
Oddný Helgadóttir
Henk Isom
Mookie Kideckel
Bryan Knapp
Isadora Mota
Lindsay Schakenbach
Table of Contents
Guidelines for Participation
Towards a Critical Methodology
Macrohistories
The Early Modern Economy
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Enlightenment Political Economy
The Industrial Revolution
Institutional Regimes
The Imperial Reach
The Corporation
Consolidation and Crisis
The Liberal Global Order
Deindustrialization and Consumer Society
Finance and Shareholder Value
Scholarly Resources
Miscellaneous Bibliography (unannotated)
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Guidelines for Participation
This document is organized by the topic of each week’s seminar. Ideally, Professor Rockman’s
bibliographic essay and student contributions will be added before the Wednesday session, but
adding content retroactively is certainly fine. Each student is responsible for a single annotated
entry during eight of the thirteen weeks of the course. If a student has several entries to provide
during a given week, that is fine; however, the goal is an entry for eight different weeks, not
eight entries in a single week.
The titles entered on the bibliography may come from your previous coursework and field-prep
reading; they may come from your own expertise; they may come from asking a professor or
classmate about a “must read” book or article for the particular topic at hand. Our goal is to
develop of bibliography that reflects our geographical and methodological diversity. The optimal
entry is something that could prove useful to scholars working in different times and places.
Your entry-- in Ariel 11 pt font-- should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style bibliographical
form, and be followed by several sentences that describe the book or article and explain why it
might be interesting or useful to others. The citation should be in bold, the description in normal
text, and the entry should conclude with your name (in 9 pt font). Here is a sample entry:
Mandelblatt, Bertie. “A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic
World.” History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 18-47.
Salt beef was the most important food provision for slaves in the French colonies, and its
movement from Ireland to France to St. Domingue called the Atlantic into being as a commercial
space in the eighteenth century. This is an exemplary commodity study, especially as
Mandleblatt conceptualizes Irish cattlemen, Portuguese salt-harvesters, and numerous others
in the supply chain of salted beef as material accessories to plantation slavery in the Americas.
Useful for thinking more generally about the relationship of distant producers and consumers.
[Seth Rockman]
Ultimately each entry will have its own texture, but the above sample is at approximately the
level of detail appropriate for this bibliography.
At the end of this document is a page devoted to web resources like blogs or discussion
boards. Please feel free to supplement as appropriate. And the final page is available for a nonannotated bibliography of articles worth sharing (but for which you don’t want to write a blurb).
You can also snag an entry from that bibliography to use for a longer annotated entry. And any
title mentioned in one of Professor Rockman’s essays is eligible for an annotated entry.
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Towards a Critical Methodology
Thomas G. Rawski et al., Economics and the Historian (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996).
Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,” Critical Inquiry 21
(Winter 1995): 434-467.
Andreas Langenohl, “’In the Long Run We are all Dead’: Imaginary Time in Financial Market
Narratives,” Cultural Critique 70 (Fall 2008): 3-31.
It seemed risky to define capitalism at the outset of the semester, lest we set terms that
would over-determine how we understand actual phenomena in the past. Nonetheless, there
are some decent starting places for a definition, including James Fulcher’s Capitalism: A
Very Short Introduction (2004). There is currently much enthusiasm for Ha-Joon Chang, 23
Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (2010). In 2001, Peter Hall and David Soskice
published Varieties of Capitalism, a globe-spanning volume that argued against a rigid unitary
definition; Business History Review 84 (winter 2010) includes a roundtable on the durability
of the “varieties” approach a decade later. Two recent essays that illuminate a great deal are
Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,”
Modern Intellectual History 9 (2012); and Jürgen Kocka, “Writing the History of Capitalism,”
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (2010).
Insofar as the history of capitalism seems to have colonized several subfields, it might be
worth assessing the current state of labor, business, and economic history, as well as political
economy. For labor history, see Leon Fink’s essay in Labor: Studies in the Working-Class
History of the Americas 8 (2011). For business history, see the editorial manifesto in Business
History Review 85 (spring 2011). For the political economy of capitalism as a distinct subfield
in US history, see Sven Beckert in Foner and McGirr’s American History Now (2011). For “The
Past, Present, and Future of Economics for History,” see Social Science History 35 (summer
2011). An article that easily could have been on our syllabus is Randall Morck and Bernard
Yeung, “Economics, History, and Causation,” BHR 85 (spring 2011): 39-63.
There is no lack of commentary on the discipline of economics and its pretense of being a
predictive science. On more heterodox approaches in the field, see Dan Berrett, “Economists
Push for a Broader Range of Viewpoints in their Field,” Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 13, 2011; or Peter Monaghan, “Taking on ‘Rational Man,’” CHE January 24, 2003.
For critiques of economics, see Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the
Social Sciences (2001), Christopher Hayes, “What We Learn When We Learn Economics,” In
These Times, November 27, 2006; Mike Alberti’s Remapping Debate six-part series from 2012;
the NYT series on “Rethinking How We Teach Economics”; and the routines of Yoram Bauman,
the nation’s leading stand-up economist. For the “good” Deirdre McCloskey, see The Rhetoric of
Economics (1998).
Cultural theory approaches to capitalism can be mystifying, as in Manuel DeLanda’s “Markets,
Antimarkets, and the World Economy.” There are some compelling articles in the special issue
of Public Culture 12 (2000), beginning with the framing essay by Jean Comaroff and John L.
Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” On the distillation of vast
swaths of human experience into a quantifiable abstraction, see Daniel Breslau, “Economics
Invents the Economy: Mathematics, Statistics, and Models in the Work of Irving Fisher and
Wesley Mitchell,” Theory & Society 32.3 (2003): 379-411; Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy
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Nelson Espeland, “Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of
Economic Rationality,” American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991); Marcel Bouman, “Measure
for Measure: How Economists Model the World into Numbers,” Social Research 68 (2001).
Perhaps the most assignable essay is Timothy Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural
Studies 12 (1998). For some recent discussions of space and materiality, see A.K. SandovalStrausz, “Spaces of Commerce: A Historiographic Introduction to Certain Architectures of
Capitalism,” Winterthur Portfolio 44 (summer/autumn 2010): 143-158.
Potentially less obnoxious than Economics and the Historian is Douglass C. North’s
Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005). Also useful is the account by
sociologist Mark Granovetter, “The Impact of Social Structures on Economic Outcomes,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (Winter 2005): 33-50. Granovetter is a key figure in
economic sociology, having elaborated the notion of “embeddedness” from Polanyi. See the
forum on embeddedness in Socio-Economic Review 2 (2004): 109-134. The new book worth
consulting is Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (2011).
Marieke De Goede. Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. University of
Minnesota Press, 2005.
Marieke De Goede subverts the imaginary of finance as an orderly and rational set of practices,
institutions, and ideas. Drawing heavily on poststructuralist theory, most notably Michel
Foucault and Judith Butler, de Goede demonstrates the difficulties that legislatures faced when
they sought to legitimize financial speculation while banning gambling. Clear definitions that
set one apart from the other proved elusive and de Goede show that to date many financial
practices can easily be understood as gambling. In fact, what really separates finance from
gambling is nothing but the performance of it as objectively and substantially different. In other
words it is not the inherent nature of finance, but the discourses, practices, and institutions
constructed around it, all of which are historically contingent and more opportune for certain
sectors of society than others, that make it a legitimate pursuit. [Oddny Helgadottir]
Landes, David S., Mokyr, Joel, and Baumol, William J., eds. The Invention of Enterprise:
Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010.
These eighteen essays (including a number on the non-Western world) try to theorize the
entrepreneur as a force of history. Insofar as the book appears in a series funded by the
Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation, it might be somewhat self-serving. The volume makes
good on some of the promises that Baumol spelled out in several foundational articles on why
entrepreneurs matter, or those articulated in Scott Shane and S. Venkataraman, “The Promise
of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research,” Academy of Management Review 25 (2000). [SR]
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times. New York: Verso, 1994.
Arrighi was, alongside Emmanuel Wallerstein, one of the preeminent practitioners of world
systems theory—a body of scholarship that treats all economies as interlocked and interacting
in one world economic system. As the title suggests, Arrighi attempts in this work to uncover
the origins of capitalism and its recurrent patterns. Briefly, Arrighi argues that capitalism is
the result of an interaction of market and non-market forces in the upper echelons of society.
He begins his synthesis by looking to Italian city-states in late medieval Europe (ca. 13401630) and goes on to explore the Dutch period (ca. 1560-1780) and the British era (ca. 17401930). The current era, in turn, is one of US hegemony. Arrighi’s conclusion is that throughout
history we have witnessed what he calls “systemic cycles of accumulation”: A reigning system
is impaired as the returns to production and trade decline. As a result, capital is pulled out of
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the system and moved elsewhere—where natural and organizational advantages are in place—
in pursuit of higher returns. A new system is thus formed and can prosper until its advantages
are used up and the whole process is repeated. While Arrighi gleans this pattern in history,
he does not maintain that transitions from one system to the next are neat and predictable or
that systems are uniform. Quite the contrary, he sees the systems as distinguished by different
forms of organization which lend each its unique character. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. Capitalist
Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
In this book, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (RSS), develop a theoretical framework
to conduct a comparative historical analysis of the relationship between capitalist development
and democracy. Their fundamental aim is to resolve the controversy posed by the opposite
results of large-N, quantitative studies and small-N, qualitative historical comparisons. By
presenting a strong statistical correlation between capitalist development and democracy, largeN analyses provided the basis for modernization theorists such as Seymour Lipset to claim
democracy as an inevitable outcome of capitalist growth (and also the basis for US foreign
policy to some extent). On the other hand, theorists such as Barrington Moore, Max Weber
and even Marxists have argued that democracy was a result of historically contingent factors
in the 19th century and a result primarily of the bourgeoisie overthrowing the landed elites and
feudalism (“No Bourgeoisie, No Democracy”). In a novel approach, RSS accept the correlation
provided by modernization theorists but reject their explanation (i.e., economic growth leads
to increases in wealth, education and thus democratic forms of governance). For the causal
explanation, RSS tweak the class-based arguments of qualitative analyses, especially Moore.
First, RSS argue that democracy of the type Moore and Marxists conceived was really limited,
bourgeois democracy, with no universal suffrage and that it has historically not been extended
by the bourgeoisie. Second, they conceive democracy as a historical power struggle between
classes, which varied as capitalist forms of production advanced. RSS basically argue that the
spread of capitalism over the past 250 years or so led to a swelling up of the working class.
This massive increase of the working class not only diminished the power of anti-democratic
land-owning classes but also by organizing itself and forming alliances with other classes,
it is actually the working class—not the bourgeoisie—that historically ushered in complete
democracy (universal suffrage) across time and space under capitalism. So capitalism has often
led to democracy but only due to working class struggle. RSS successfully test their theoretical
framework by analyzing the historical class dynamics in Europe, US, Australia, New Zealand,
Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean to accordingly explain the emergence or
demise of capitalist democracies. [Puneet Bhasin]
Brawley, Mark R. Power, Money, Trade: Decisions That Shape Global Economic
Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Though it is by a political scientist and reads like a textbook, Brawley’s Power, Money, Trade
is an invaluable book for anybody looking to understand the study of international political
economy. Brawley draws on the insights of scholars from when it was still political economy
(i.e. before it split into political science and economics) as well as work since then and provides
a readable and concise introduction to some of the major models and levels of analysis in the
discipline: i.e. realism, liberalism, institutionalism, constructivism and system/state level. He
employs each to try and explain certain historical events - repeal of the Corn Laws, for instance.
Historians looking at capitalism are entering into territory that scholars in other disciplines have
attempted to tread for years; Brawley offers a nice introduction to theories we may use (or
discard) in our inquiries. [Mookie Kideckel]
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Macrohistories
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
Kenneth Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe,
China, and the Global Conjecture,” American Historical Review 107 (April 2002): 425-446.
R. Bin Wong, “The Search for European Difference and Domination in the Early Modern World: A
View from Asia,” American Historical Review 107 (April 2002): 447-469.
The excitement over Deep History notwithstanding, the genre of macrohistory continues to
veer towards the politically-charged exploration of Western “domination.” Most recently (and
shamelessly) is Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). A flurry of books in
the late 1990s made similar claims: David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998);
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures (1998); and Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and
Steel (1997). To be fair, Diamond privileged accidents of geography over culture, but he was
still abused widely in reviews. Ultimately, these three books elicited review essays that were
more insightful than the books themselves, as in the forum on Landes in AHR 104 (October
1999) with Donna Guy and Joel Moykr; several reviews by Joel Mokyr published elsewhere;
Gale Stokes, “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” AHR 106
(April 2001); Bruce Mazlish, “Big Questions? Big History?” History & Theory 38 (May 1999);
and James Blaut’s devastating essay in Geographical Review 89 (June 1999). One longs for
the earlier work of an Alfred Crosby or William McNeill, both of whom gave a lot of attention to
microbes. Of course, Crosby also ventured into cultural explanations in The Measure of Reality:
Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (1999); see the forum in AHR 105 (April 2000).
Within economic history, Clark’s recent rivals in hubris have been Daron Acemoglu et al.,
“Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of Modern World Income
Distribution,” which tries to explain why the richest places in 1500 are the poorest places today
and vice-versa. Shockingly, it has nothing to do with slavery, colonialism, or anything like that.
Nope it is simply a matter of “institutions,” a point reinforced by Dani Rodrik et al. in “Institutions
Rule.” In a recent NYRB, Jared Diamond has written a critical review of the book-length
treatment of Acemoglu’s institutions argument; see also Gareth Austin, “The ‘reversal of fortune’
thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from African and comparative economic
history,” Journal of International Development 20 (2008). On a completely different register is
Brown’s Oded Galor, who brings evolutionary biology into economics to generate a “unified
growth theory” accounting for the last 100,000 years.
A much longer “revisionist” tradition suggests that nothing was foreordained about “the West”
and that what did happen owed to accident; happened relatively recently; or was a product of
genocidal violence. One might start with Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History
(1982); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (1989); James Blaut, Colonizer’s
Model of the World (1993); or Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient (1998). Scholars of China are
now at the forefront of this work, and one finds references to a “California School” in light of the
academic homes of scholars like Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, Jack Wills, Jack Goldstone,
and Robert Marks (whose Origins of the Modern World is the most succinct and assignable
version of these diverse but complementary interventions). A concise appraisal of The Great
Divergence is in Historically Speaking 12 (Sept. 2011). See also Pomeranz and Steven Topik,
The World that Trade Created, 2nd ed. (2006) for another assignable text.
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There probably deserves to be some discussion of a world systems model, now in a nearly
pocket-sized version: Immanuel Wallerstein, World System Analysis: An Introduction (2004).
A different assessment of globalization is Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals:
Analytical Fictions, 1492-1945,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (Fall 2002).
Can “culture” ever figure into accounts of economic development without making historians
wince? Joyce Appleby hopes so in her 500 year account of capitalism, Relentless Revolution
(2010). There is a short version of Appleby-- “The Cultural Roots of Capitalism”-- and several
replies in the November 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. Fifteen years ago, the president
of the Economic History Association, Peter Temin, asked “Is it Kosher to Talk about Culture?”
Journal of Economic History 57 (June 1997). The fact that Temin begins with “Anglo-Saxon
individualism” suggests it is not. Comparisons between American and Japanese business
practices figure here, as they do also in the much more palatable and influential Kenneth
Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business and Economic History 24
(Winter 1995).
Goldstone, Jack A. “The Rise of the West – Or Not? A Revision to Socio-Economic
History.” Sociological Theory 18 (July 2000): 175-194.
Goldstone argues that England and Europe developed the cultural climate necessary for
industrialization by accident. Seventeenth-century Britain and Japan were similar in terms of
work ethic and resource limitations, yet while Japan solved its problems with an inward-looking
and burdensome government, England happened to do the opposite, importing resources and
settling political conflict with constitutional democracy in the late seventeenth century. More
liberal governance combined with religious acceptance of Newtonian science to provide the key
ingredients for an “engineering culture” that fused entrepreneurialism with pragmatism. While
this article counters Landes-type arguments about inherent European cultural superiority, it
still essentially assumes a northwest European cultural superiority (and even adheres to Black
Legend characterizations of Iberian backwardness). [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
To what degree can we reconcile Clark’s and Pomeranz’ diverging accounts of Malthusian limits
and transcendence thereof in early modern Europe and Asia? Like Clark, Pomeranz makes
the argument that pre-industrial Asia and Europe were locked into a more or less analogous
Malthusian cycle, or “cul-de-sac (264),” out of which the latter was able to break first. Rather
than attribute this to knowledge creation and cultural mores, however, Pomeranz argues that
western Europe experienced an industrious revolution largely because of the fortuitous location
of coal in Britain and because of new opportunities for trade and resources made possible by
the colonization of the New World. Thus Pomeranz’ theory of the European exit from Malthusian
constraints seems to rely much more on chance than Clark’s socio-cultural explanation. Are the
two necessarily mutually exclusive as Clark seems to imply or can useful ideas be combined
from each? [John Delea]
Kuran, Timur. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Taking name and inspiration from Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, Kuran’s The
Long Divergence shifts the focus of economic comparison from Europe and China to Europe
and the Middle East. Kuran notes that in the late Medieval and Early Modern period, the Middle
Eastern economy actually outperformed Europe’s not just in terms of output and diversity
of trade, but in the innovation of financial institutions. In attempting to dispel the prevailing
notion that Islam is inherently incompatible with economic growth (admittedly a straw man), he
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locates the divergence that marked Europe’s ascension and the Middle East’s stagnation in the
sixteenth century. Then, Europeans began to collect huge sums of capital which forced their
financial institutions to adapt, while Islamic law prevented the same kind of capital accumulation
in the Middle East. Although often problematic, it adds another geographical perspective to
the discussion of the Rise of the West, one that the extant scholarship on the topic has largely
ignored. [Henk Isom]
Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Roy Bin Wong. Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics
of Economic Change in China and Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011.
Rosenthal and occasional Pomeranz co-conspirator Bin Wong add to the divergence discussion
in this recent book which argues that differences in political institutions were the primary reason
for divergence between West and East. Europe's turgid political fragmentation in the
medieval and modern period set the foundation for polities and individuals focused on
technological innovation, commercial competition and the pursuit of markets abroad. Meanwhile
China, united as it was in one imperial polity and relatively peaceful by comparison to Europe,
fell behind as it did not need to innovate in an analogous fashion. Chinese merchants wanted
for the credit channels and industrial manufactures that propelled Europe in the European
period, bringing about divergence. This is a refreshing book in that it somewhat rehabilitates
the significance of institutions and the state to the divergence question without defaulting to the
cultural arguments embraced by Clarks, Fergusons and Landes...-es.[John Delea]
Findlay, Ronald and Kevin O’Rourke. Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World
Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Findlay and O’Rourke attempt to explain international economic inequality by looking at the
past thousand years of world trade and geopolitical development. Medieval and early modern
trade was essential to nineteenth-century European economic growth. In contrast to historians
who emphasize the importance of New World colonies, Findlay and O’Rourke point to the
Mediterranean. In addition to providing lucrative trade opportunities, the region also offered
incentives for technological development. The interference of Arab traders in the Mediterranean
prompted European merchants to find new ways to Asia. For Findlay and O’Rourke, incentives
and inventiveness, not sheer mercantile accumulation, determined growth. Limited cultivatable
land in England provided another incentive for technological development; the state needed
industrial exports to pay for the importation of food and raw goods and the military capabilities to
compete with European nations for resources. While Power and Plenty does little to explain why
Asia did not experience an Industrial Revolution, other than to cite the usual reversal of Chinese
openness in the fifteenth century, it offers a good overview of a millennium of trade and war in
Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Deng, Kent G., “Development and Its Deadlock in Imperial China, 221 B.C.- 1840 A.D.”
Economic Development and Cultural Change 51.2 (2003): 479-522.
In response to the various “why not China” questions—like the absence of industrial revolution
and capitalism in China—historians of China, from Mark Elvin onwards, often refer to a “high
level equilibrium trap model” in which the imperial Chinese society lacked profit motive for
efficiency improvement, large scale capital accumulation and technological innovation. The
emphasis on economic incentive and rational choice marks the difference between this “high
level equilibrium trap model” and the Malthus Trap model adopted in Gregory Clark’s A
Farewell to Alms. In this article, Kent G. Deng provides a more refined account of the of
the “high level equilibrium trap model”. He further suggests that the imperial Chinese peasant
was indeed an agent who made collective rational choice through military rebellions—an
argument that run contrary to both the “high level equilibrium trap model” and the problematic
but influential “Asiatic despotism/production mode model”. Deng’s account may run the risk of
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idealizing the social well being of traditional China, but this article does lead us to important
debates in the field of
Chinese history and provide a provocative answer to the long-standing questions. [Chu Shiu On]
Beaujard, Philippe and S. Fee. “The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World-Systems
before the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of World History 16:4 (December 2005): 411-465.
This article traces economic cycles in the Eurasian and African world-system between the
first and eighteenth centuries. In so doing, it offers a critique of Wallerstein’s concept of the
European capitalist world-system as Beaujard’s Eurasian and African world-system predates
the sixteenth-century birth of the European/Atlantic/West African world-system. Beaujard is
particularly interested in the mechanisms of dependence between core and periphery within the
Eurasian and African world-system. He suggests, contrary to much scholarship, that the coreperiphery relationship relied on exploitation and “co-evolution” long before the sixteenth century
and thus did not change dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. This is a long article and
there is much of interest here for scholars interested in the development of capitalism beyond
the borders of Europe. The history of the Indian Ocean, for Beaujard, challenges the belief that
capitalism was a European invention. Rather, he locates its roots in the merchants and citystates of India, Southeast Asia, and the Swahili coast beginning in the thirteenth century. It was,
nonetheless, only in the European world-system that capitalism became the “dominant mode of
production.” [Zack Dorner]
Emmer, P.C., O. Petre-Grenouilleau, and J.V. Roitman, eds. A Deus Ex Machina Revisited:
Atlantic Colonial Trade and European Economic Development. Boston, MA: Brill, 2006.
The contributors to this edited collection offer a critical reassessment of the economic effects
of Europe’s colonial expansion in the Early Modern and Modern periods. The impact of foreign
trade on European economic growth frequently appears in the work of economic historians
looking at the “Great Divergence” or the origins of industrial takeoff, including Kenneth
Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong. Yet, despite its popularity in the literature, the question of to
what extent did the colonial world contribute to the economy of Early Modern Europe remains
unresolved. On balance, this collection, with essays taking a macroeconomic scope by Patrick
O’Brien and Michel Morineau, argues that European foreign trade did not significantly help bring
about the Industrial Revolution. By their calculations, the volume and profits of New World trade
were too small in proportion to the overall European economy to make much of a difference.
Other essays in the volume examine the issue of foreign trade from a national perspective
and come to similar conclusions that the impact of foreign trade on development was marginal
in comparison to intra-European trade. While the authors, for the most part, adhere to an
economic or quantitative framework, they do acknowledge that cultural and political factors had
a greater impact on economic development than has often been described. This point, however,
remains undeveloped in a collection that otherwise covers an impressive range of geographic
and temporal ground in its analyses. [Zack Dorner]
van Zanden, Jan Luiten. The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European
Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000-1800. Brill, 2009.
True to the title, van Zanden takes a long perspective on Europe’s industrialization, contending
that the medieval period was more dynamic and more foundational than the three centuries
prior to 1800. Despite occasionally pointing to similarities with parts of Asia, he argues that
Europe was exceptional in its institutions, human capital formation and economic performance.
Participation in world markets, bottom-up institutions (like guilds), efficient institutions (low
interest rates, state-sponsorship of commerce), incentives to save costs on labor, and
demography (delayed marriage patterns) made possible the intellectual climate and labor
quality necessary for technological development, investment, and economic growth. While
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van Zanden’s emphasis on the medieval period may be overstated and his discussion of nonEuropean parts of the world limited, this book does a good job seeking out deep causes of the
Industrial Revolution and provides a nice counterweight to cultural arguments.
[Lindsay Schakenbach]
Topik, Stephen, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin
American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
In this volume of essays edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, fifteen
international historians examine the role of Latin America in the world economy from the
sixteenth century up to the present. In contrast to traditional discussions that revolve around the
continent’s unfulfilled economic potential or the importance of colonization for the accumulation
of capital in Europe, the authors follow the trajectories of twelve Latin American export goods
around the globe. They employ a commodity chain approach, which assumes that value is
created in the consumption and circulation of commodities, as well as in their production. In
such a perspective, Latin American producers cease to be only victims of external influences to
assume a more entrepreneurial and defining role in their relationship with Europe, for example.
In this volume, global patterns of trade rather than national economic policies take central stage,
but contributors do not dismiss the social and political implications of economic processes
for the different parties involved in trade. The essays vary in time and space, ranging from
silver mining in early modern Peru, to the production of rubber in nineteenth-century Brazil
and the globalization of the trade of Andean coca and cocaine from 1860 to 1950. From Silver
to Cocaine is an interesting overview of Latin America’s economic history and an insightful
alternative to more traditional narratives based on dependence theory. [Isadora Mota]
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The Early Modern Economy
Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).
John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty, “Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business
Network,” Enterprise & Society 11 (March 2010): 1-25.
John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the
Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 110 (April
2005): 295-321.
Since so many of the recent macrohistories of capitalism hinge upon developments in the early
modern period, this week functions as a bit of a carry-over from last. With next week devoted to
the Atlantic Slave Trade and the following week to Enlightenment political economy, I’d like to
devote this segment of our conversation to numerous snapshots of the early modern economy
in operation; perhaps we might have read the three volumes of Fernand Bruadel’s Civilization
and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Yet in the wake of Braudel’s accomplishment, studies
of production and consumption in innumerable localities continue to constitute the building
blocks of social history, while a focus on long-distance exchange has supported the claim that
globalization began many centuries before our own.
On global integration, the obvious book is Hal Cook’s Matters of Exchange (2007). Scholars
like Jorge Flores, Diogo Ramada Curto, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Stefan Halikowski-Smith,
Timothy Walker, and other scholars of the Portuguese Empire have helped make the Indian
Ocean perhaps the most important body of water in the early modern period. The Pacific has its
advocates among those focusing on silver flowing westward from New World mines to China.
Don’t forget the Mediterranean, especially not the prize-winning Familiarity of Strangers by
Brown PhD Francesca Trivellato. And of course, the Atlanticists make their claims, usually
through commodity studies (e.g. David Hancock, Oceans of Wine [2009]) and usually in
conjunction with the slave trade. The integration of indigenous North American communities into
the global economy is told most pessimistically in Denys Delage’s Bitter Feast (1993), but has
received a happier gloss in the work of economic historians Ann Carlos and Frank D. Lewis,
Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade (2011). For South
America, Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) is still somewhat mindblowing; I am curious about John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajio
and Spanish North America (2011). On the Atlantic’s overall utility in economic history, see
Peter Coclanis’s “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World,” WMQ 63 (October 2006).
On the internal economies of particular early modern nations, the emphasis has largely
switched from production to consumption. Obviously, someone like Jan de Vries can link the
two through the concept of an “industrious revolution” [“The Industrial Revolution and the
Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994)]. Still, much of the attention
over the last 20 years has been on consumption, beginning with the massive Consumption and
the World of Goods (1993). Talking about cool stuff is more interesting than discussing grain
harvests. Jennifer Anderson’s forthcoming Mahogany (2012) offers the state-of-the-field.
For the Financial Revolution in England, Craig Muldrew is probably the best-known scholar
of the concept of credit, while John Brewer’s Sinews of Power and Bruce Carruthers’s City
of Capital are often cited on the rise of the military-fiscal state. More comparatively, see the
several volumes on mercantile empires edited by James D. Tracy. Nuala Zehedieh The Capital
and the Colonies (2010) is the current economic history of English’s Atlantic empire; she has
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a lot of other articles. Here is a recent conference on political economy and the early modern
Atlantic. For coinage, representation, and the state, see the work of Christine Desan and others
in the “Money Matters” issue of Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11.1 (2010). In The Social Life
of Money in the English Past (2006), Deborah Valenze has a nice discussion of heads (royal
state power) and tales (the kinds of stories generated by money in everyday circulation). And of
course, the fabulously titled “Big Problem of Small Change” by Thomas Sargent and Francois
Velde (in both article and book form). James Surowiecki has a short account of the history of
money in a 2012 forum on the future of money.
Howell, Martha C. Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600. New York:
Cambridge University Press. 2010.
In her book Howell recounts how increased commerce affected certain aspects of private
life in early modern Europe. The key characteristic of increasing commerce was the growing
drive to render more objects into sellable goods. The commodification of real estate, land
and other things that had formerly anchored and stabilized various social practices disturbed
the equilibrium of societies in various ways. The bulk of Howell’s study consists of in-depth
explorations of three facets of private life that were transformed: the relationships of married
couples, the culture of gift giving, and sumptuary codes. Briefly, Howell does not see the stress
on conjugal love and the role of the wife as her husband’s business partner in many documents
after the fifteenth-century as an expression of female emancipation. Rather, she sees it as
symptomatic of a new economic system in which an expanding array of objects could be sold
and more wealth had to be managed between husband and wife. The result was not only a
modification of marital property and inheritance law but also a cultural change in marriage itself,
necessitating a focus on love as an adhesive. The lavish culture of exchanging gifts during this
period has often been understood as suggestive of an inefficient and archaic economy. Instead,
Howell demonstrates that it was the purview of an increasingly quantified and standardized
economy, in which the meaning of gifts shifted from a purely social to a more commercial one.
This compromised the social importance of gifts and led to charges of corruption when gifts
changed hands. The solution was to reassert the social meaning of gift giving by making it a
very public act. Similarly, growing commerce made clothing a commodity in a sense that it was
not before. This meant that various kinds of clothing, formerly reserved for specific classes,
became available to those with the means to purchase them and sometimes articles of clothing
were recycled in unintended ways. This new divorce of identity from appearance was the
reason that sumptuary laws were imposed. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
Tracy, Patrick D., ed. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World
Trade: 1350-1750. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
This collection of essays centers on the question of why European concerns eventually
achieved dominance in global trade at the expense of rivals. The answer: because Europeans
either organized merchant empires as extensions of the State (Portugal’s Estado de India) or
as autonomous trading companies (British EIC, Dutch VOC). The essays focus on institutions,
relationships between merchants and their respective states, the importance of the military
power, piracy and privateering, transportation and transaction costs, colonies as mercantile
investments (colonies did pay), and a comparison of the Tokugawa Shogunate and Hapsburg
Spain (Japan was like England and Spain combined). This collection as a whole provide a nice
overview of why and how merchant empires functioned economically and politically (and to
some extent, culturally, as there is an essay on the subtle give-and-takes between Portuguese
and South Asians in the Indian Ocean by Sanjay Subrahmanyam). [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Hancock, David. Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and
Taste. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
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More than a simple commodity study, Hancock’s Oceans of Wine addresses head-on the
development and emergence of an inter-imperial Atlantic community tied together by bonds
of capital, taste, and trust in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Madeira is the star of
this work and Hancock reveals in formidable detail every aspect of its transit across the early
modern Atlantic; from growers on the island of Madeira, through a variety of middlemen, to the
wine connoisseurs and taste makers of the mainland colonies. You will learn more than you
ever wanted to know about Madeira from this work. Apparently not satisfied with an exhaustive
study of Madeira, Hancock also uses the example of the Madeira trade to illustrate his theory of
networks that challenges prevailing notions of a strong center-periphery relationship. Instead,
Hancock’s conception of a decentralized, networked and self-organized Atlantic world, which he
had been formulating in print for years, emphasizes the role of relationships between individual
actors away from imperial centers in shaping the early modern commercial system. [Zack Dorner]
Cook, Harold J. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch
Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Employing network theory to explain commercial and scientific developments, Cook argues that
early modern science developed in tandem with an increased level of commercial exchanges.
Environmental and social circumstances in the Netherlands created a class of merchants whose
values and questions began to shape both consumerism and knowledge about the natural
world. As merchants scoured the globe for goods, information became extremely valuable.
It became important to know where to go for spices, herbal medicines, and other goods and
how to procure them, as well as to know something about the actual materials themselves.
The investigation of the materials that was essential to commerce thus helped give rise to
Descartes’s materialism. All of this knowledge developed not from a limited number of elite
natural philosophers, but was instead the culmination of local networks of knowledge all over
the globe. This is a wonderfully comprehensive study of how science and capitalism developed
together in the early modern world. [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Jarvis, Michael J. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime
Atlantic World 1680-1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
At the intersection of maritime history, Atlantic history, colonial American history, and economic
history, In the Eye of All Trade centers on British-American mariners based in Bermuda and
the role these actors played in forging connections between disparate regions of the Atlantic
world. Jarvis, like Hancock, employs up-to-date network models to illustrate how, as a result of
its self-organized shipping industry, Bermuda became a hub of commerce and communication
in the eighteenth century. While the work contains numerous worthwhile details, Jarvis’s
examination of “Atlantic commons” (such as salt flats in the Turks and Caicos) is particularly
helpful in illuminating how economic interplay at sites on the margins of imperial control
actively contributed to commerce in this era. Additionally, In the Eye of All Trade provides
useful information about island life and the impact of the American Revolution on Bermudian
intercolonial maritime trade. [Zack Dorner]
Zahedieh, Nuala. The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 16601700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Arguing against the decentralized frameworks adopted by by Hancock and Jarvis, Zahedieh
focuses on London as the centralized commercial hub for Atlantic trade in the late-seventeenth
century. The Navigation Acts, according to Zahedieh, provided the stimulus for English
economic growth in the second half of the seventeenth century and laid the groundwork for the
eventual Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Mercantilism alone was not
responsible for the bulk of commercial development however; and Zahedieh describes how
weak enforcement of the Navigation Acts between 1660 and 1688 fostered competition among
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English merchants, which in turn spurred gains in shipping efficiency and innovation. As a
result, by the end of the seventeenth century London had become a major European entrepot
to rival Amsterdam and English colonial expansion under the Navigation Acts put England on
the road toward industrial takeoff. While Zahedieh may overstate the centrality of metropolitan
ports, especially in light of concurrent scholarship, the analyses of shipping data and detailed
examinations of merchants’ commercial practices in The Capital and the Colonies are important
regardless of the model. [Zack Dorner]
Sacks, David Harris. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700.
Berkeley: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sacks examines the effects of Atlantic market integration in one early modern city. As Bristol’s
commercial role changed with the capture of Bourdeaux by France in 1453, Bristol could no
longer rely on exporting wool and importing wine. Instead, its merchants had to search for
new and diverse economic opportunities. Because ventures into the Mediterranean and to
Newfoundland were riskier, merchants required monopoly protection by the Merchant Ventures
and then the royal government. Competition between merchant groups ensued, and those
shut out from royal protection formed an underclass that turned to New World trade in sugar,
tobacco, and indentured servants, for mercantile opportunities. Religious and trust networks
were key to commercial operations, but by the late eighteenth century, the consumer boom
coupled with post-1688 policies increased economic diversification and helped lessen religious
and political. While we do not learn about Bristol’s relationship with surrounding towns, this book
provides a useful examination of the social and economic changes wrought by increasingly
capitalistic Atlantic trade in one port city. [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Greer, Allan. Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes,
1740-1840. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Although this book functions primarily as a cultural history of the Quebecois peasantry, Allan
Greer also tells the story of the shift from feudalism to capitalism in the Canadian countryside.
At the start of his work, feudal lords exploit the peasants’, or habitants’, labor through the rent
they collect. After the French and Indian War British merchants began to penetrate Quebec
and they offered new economic opportunities for the habitants as Canada and its winter wheat
became one of the world’s breadbaskets, in addition to turning huge profits for themselves.
However, they also locked the Quebecois in yet another fiscal hierarchy through debt and credit
that proved just as exploitative as feudalism. Worth reading for the wonderful texture Greer
grants to an understudied population, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant also shows the spread of
capitalism and British economic Empire from the perspective of the people those institutions
exploited. [Henk Isom]
Pincus, Steve. “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, The British Empire, and the
Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” William and Mary Quarterly
69 (January 2012): 3-70.
This description is from the abstract: Atlantic historians and early American historians have
by and large maintained that because there was a mercantilist consensus in Europe the
differences among empires had to do with the different endowments that the Europeans
encountered on the periphery. They have also suggested that deviance from mercantilist goals
must have derived from the structural weakness of early modern states. The British Empire
in particular, we are told, was incapable of enforcing its mercantilist economic legislation.
Against these claims, I suggest that there was a lively debate within the British Empire in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about political economic issues. Far from accepting
the finite nature of wealth, many Britons argued that property was based on human labor and
that therefore there was the possibility for limitless economic growth. Because there was no
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mercantilist consensus about political economy, imperial policy both in Britain and the colonies
was necessarily a politically contested issue. The essay is followed by 5 responses. [Seth
Rockman]
von Glahn, Richard. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 10001700. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1996.
Because of the assumption of a monolithic Confucian value that discourages any profit seeking
activities, the discourse of money and monetary policy among pre modern Chinese scholarofficials is often neglected in western scholarship. With a survey of wide-ranging debates, both
in courts and among the literati, from the Song dynasty to the early Qing dynasty, von Glahn’s
book demonstrates the importance of money in traditional Chinese political and intellectual
discourse. By forming his arguments according to European monetary theories, he may be
accused of “Euro-centrism”, but in the case of monetary thought, this approach does have the
advantage of avoiding pitfalls of Chinese exceptionalism. In addition to these debates, von
Glahn goes into various statistics of late Ming and early Qing (the seventeenth century) and
takes on a prevailing argument in Chinese economic history—the inflow of American silver
significantly increase the Chinese currency supply, and thus brought to the prosperity of late
Ming. He compares several indicators of prosperity, especially the price of rice, to the amount
of importing silver, and points out that the Chinese economy in this period did not rise and fall
in the same pace with silver imports. The conclusion derived from this comparative approach
may not be fully convincing, but it successfully problematizes the simple causal linkage between
American silver, Chinese currency supply and economic growth. [Chu Shiu On]
Steensgaard, Niels. The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East
India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1973.
Working in the Annales tradition, Steensgaard uses economic data and a host of
correspondence to explore the changing structure of the European-Asian commodity trade upon
the arrival of the English (EIC) and Dutch (VOC) East India Companies in the early seventeenth
century. The presence of the EIC and VOC precipitated a structural crisis in the Middle East
between two different trading systems: the pre-existing caravan trade and the redistributive
enterprises that controlled it, and the company sea routes. By internalizing protection costs,
according to Steensgaard, the EIC and VOC increasingly were able to control prices, minimize
uncertainty, and improve market transparency, facilitating the profitable usage of sea routes at
the expense of caravan routes. The companies, however, did not transform Asian trade right
away, failing in their attempts to redirect the Persian silk trade away from caravan routes. In
fact, caravan trade survived side-by-side with company trade in the seventeenth century as
room continued to exist for profits to be had by participants in both trades. Structural factors
take center stage at the expense of individuals in the book, and, despite devoting two full
sections to political narrative, Steensgaard minimizes the impact of individual agency on the
structural trends he describes. [Zack Dorner]
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, eds. The Birth of a Consumer Society:
The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982.
In this important work, Neil McKendrick first articulates the idea of an early modern “commercial
revolution,” locating it specifically in eighteenth-century England. While McKendrick is not the
first (or only) scholar to propose a significant moment of commercial change, he argues that
all developments prior to the eighteenth century were only prerequisites for this revolution.
Objects became within the reach of a larger section of society than ever before, and more
and more people entertained aspirations of acquiring objects. By the end of the eighteenth
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century a new class of consumers had emerged. McKendrick does not suggest that the desire
to be a consumer was new in the eighteenth century, rather it was the ability to do so that had
emerged. John Brewer also contributes a valuable essay to this work that emphasizes the
shift from a client economy to a credit economy in eighteenth-century England. This new credit
economy underlied the development of consumerism and new forms of politics out-of-doors
as the elite were no longer able to maintain a monopoly of purchasing power. Brewer’s essay
illuminates nascent linkages between commercialization and politics in England in the 1760s,
similar to those described in the North American colonies by T.H. Breen in the Marketplace of
Revolution (2004). While McKendrick’s idea of a consumer revolution changed the perspectives
that historians could take in studying consumption and many historians agree that something
happened in the eighteenth century, consensus as to what, when, why, or for whom commercial
change occurred is still lacking. [Zack Dorner]
Fine, Ben and Ellen Leopold. “Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution.” Social
History 15:2 (May 1990): 151-179.
Fine and Leopold offer a critique of Neil McKendrick’s “consumerist approach” from 1982 by
pointing out the drawbacks of his trickle-down model of demand that emphasizes fashion and
social emulation as the motors of consumerism. Rather, Fine and Leopold stress the role of
wages and markets in stimulating demand through examples of coal and second-hand clothing
markets in Britain. McKendrick’s idea of a consumer revolution remains relevant, however,
because, as Fine and Leopold agree, it has helped shift emphasis from supply to demand in
economic models by demonstrating how demand (consumption) alone can influence supply in
both quantitative and qualitative ways. [Zack Dorner]
Martin, John Frederick. Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding
of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991; Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the
Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983; and James Scott, Seeing Like
a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998.
The sun and the earth - for humans, for history and economic systems - are the ultimate
material determinants. Historian John Frederick Martin’s Profits in the Wilderness, and William
Cronon’s study made explicit the private property regime playing out on sections and slices of
continent in the seventeenth century. Land for early Europeans existed as “a form of capital, a
thing consumed for the express purpose of creating augmented wealth. It was the land-capital
equation” that led to destructive/productive transformations of entire landscapes, and the social
adjustments people were forced to make because of their actions. In Profits, Puritan “town
fathers” – local elites with the wherewithal to found towns – established incorporated townships
and chose who could or could not live within town boundaries. Though James Scott could apply
to the Institutional Regimes or Postindustrialism sections, his work adds helpful theoretical
perspective on ideas of the private property regimes. Scott detailed the rise of codicil mapping –
the fencing, enclosing, and marking of identifiable and defendable plots in order to sell, trade
and accumulate. First land, now water and the human genome. Many colonists, hopeful to
establish their totally-removed city on a hill, remained connected to Europe in the form of debt
structures and economic ideologies. For Cronon, ecology in New England interlinked with
economy across the Atlantic, and the “colonists’ economic relations of production were
ecologically self-destructive.” Colonists buying land, establishing towns, felling trees for building
materials and fuel, and raising livestock “assumed the limitless availability of more land to
exploit, and in the long run that was impossible.” The story of New England in the seventeenth
century had been of human “growth” and “development” almost everywhere, whether driven by
capitalist modes of production or not. People tended to utilize “new land until it was exhausted,”
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shifted it to pastureland and then moved to another tract of forest, whereupon they cut down
more trees for fuel, building requirements, or boardwood shipped to the West Indies and
Europe, to places that had already lived through deforestation and population expansion.
Particularly revealing is Martin’s analysis of land speculation and Puritan justifications,
ideologies of land “improvement,” and the “clash of public and private interpretation of towns.”
Explicit in problems that Puritan landholders and controllers of towns had in keeping
undesirables out of their towns was population growth and mobility – early charters, visions of
communal space and land ownership could not keep up with demographic changes in colonial
New England. [Bryan Knapp]
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The Atlantic Slave Trade
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
(New York: Verso, 1997).
Chris Evans, “The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity,” William and Mary
Quarterly 69 (January 2012): 71-100.
Stephen Behrendt, “Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the
British Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (January 2001): 171-204.
Almost seventy years after its publication, Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams remains the
starting point simply by virtue of its title, even as its dual argument-- that profits from Caribbean
slavery launched British industrialization, and in turn, profits from industrialization made slave
trade abolition and West Indian emancipation economically viable-- has been challenged from
every direction. Barbara Solow’s British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery (1987) assessed
the Williams thesis in light of a generation of revisionist scholarship; but as her recent NYRB
exchange with David Brion Davis suggests, controversy remains. I am postponing discussion
of capitalism and abolition for a few more weeks, when we’ll discuss the Industrial Revolution;
likewise discussion of the economies of plantation slavery.
The economic origins of African slavery in the Americas are contested. Philip Curtin’s Rise and
Fall of the Plantation Complex (1990) stresses the methodical westward expansion of Levant
sugar production, first to the Atlantic islands off the African coast and then across to Brazil.
Other scholars have been more focused on the “why Africans?” question, provocatively taken
up by David Eltis in a 1993 AHR article arguing that it would have been cheaper to enslave
other Europeans; the fact that this didn’t happen suggests racial ideology trumped economic
logic. Seymour Drescher rebuts this in his “White Atlantic?” essay in Slavery in the Development
of the Americas (2004), a very good volume of economic analysis of New World Slavery. In
the North American context, this debate has typically asked whether racism caused slavery
or slavery caused racism. Two of my absolute favorite articles summarize the historiography
while also making compelling claims on American history in its entirety: Nathan Huggins, “The
Deforming Mirror of Truth,” Radical History Review 49 (1991); and Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery,
Race, and Ideology in the U.S.A.,” New Left Review 181 (May/June 1990).
The mechanics of slave purchasing on the West African coast have been explored by Paul
Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History,” AHR 104 (April 1999),
while new work by G. Ugo Nwokeji and Roquinaldo Ferreira further illuminates the African side
of the trade. The most compelling account of mundane marketplace negotiations is Robert
Harms, The Diligent (2002), a microhistory of a single French slaving voyage in the 1730s.
Rediker’s Slave Ship and Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery are both brilliant in their accounts of
the Middle Passage, while Emma Christopher’s Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes
(2006) is worthwhile. Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic (2005) uses critical theory to make
the Middle Passage formative in the logic of finance capitalism. Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring
Women (2004) stresses slavery as a regime of reproduction and property built squarely on top
of women’s bodies.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has introduced vast chronological and geographical
complexity into the study of what might be otherwise an undifferentiated account of some
13 million victims over five centuries. The essays in the WMQ “New Perspectives on the
Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 58 (January 2001) are useful, while the 2010 Atlas of the
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Transatlantic Slave Trade offers amazing maps and charts. For the RI dimension, see Sarah
Deutch, “Elusive Newport Guineamen” NEQ 55 (1982); Rachel Chernos-Lin in Slavery &
Abolition 23 (2002); Leonardo Marques, “Slave Trading in a New World,” Journal of the Early
Republic 32 (2012); and of course Brown’s Slavery & Justice Report and related documents.
Slave-grown commodities are central to Atlantic capitalism, with Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and
Power (1985) remaining indispensable. Michael Tadman looks at the demography of the sugar
regime in AHR 105 (December 2000). For other commodities, see the work of Michelle Craig
McDonald (coffee), and Judith Carney, Peter Coclanis, and numerous others in a contentious
debate on rice in AHR 112 (December 2007) and 115 (February 2010). This “black rice” debate
raises urgent questions of African expertise and technology in the construction of plantation
agriculture.
Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American
Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Saltwater Slavery is a cultural history of the economic processes of the Atlantic slave trade.
Drawing on the business records and correspondence of the Royal African Company,
Smallwood charts the brutal commodification that occurred between the Gold Coast and
English America, as African bodies were rendered objects for sale in both African and American
markets. While Africans experienced ceaseless violence on the journey from Old World to New,
their deaths were recorded in account books in such a way as to make the European owner the
passive victim of this loss of life. The journey itself was a disorienting European construction
of time and space so that by the time surviving Africans arrived in the Americas, they did not
naturally develop creole cultures, contrary to what some historians have argued. Saltwater
commodification had become their homeland and it was not until the second decade of the
eighteenth century that slaves put down stable cultural roots in America. This book provides an
excellent cultural counterweight to detached studies that focus on slave trade capitalization.
[Lindsay Schakenbach]
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Baucom’s book uses a single incident—the decision of the captain of the slave ship Zong in
1781 to cast 133 living slaves overboard to drown—as an entry point to explore various strand
of history, including that of the Atlantic slave trade, the emergence of the abolitionist movement
and the rise of financial capitalism and the insurance industry. The unfeeling captain went on
to demand full insurance compensation for the slaves he had drowned and the legal documents
(part of a civil, not criminal trial) show that the lives lost were never a concern as slaves were,
by law, on a par with commodities such as chattel. Rather, the legal wrangling centered on
whether the captain’s actions constituted fraud or a breach of contract. In this way, slaves were
not only commodified but made part of a financial imaginary through which their lives could be
used for abstract financial transactions and speculation. In this way, Baucom contends, the
tragic incident was an important watershed not only in the material history of slavery but in the
rise of financial thought, noting specifically the precedence it took over any moral concerns.
Baucom argues that this moral order of financial capitalism has been carried over into today’s
world. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Rather than examining the commodification of enslaved Africans through a study of ledgers
and tables, Rediker illuminates the mechanism for this transformation: the slave ship. The
slave ship was the factory in which sailors and captains transformed enslaved Africans into
slaves, commodities for sale, through a litany of violent techniques that also added value to the
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captives. The economic dimension of the trans-Atlantic slave trade takes a backseat to harsh
and painful anecdotes in Rediker’s narrative. The Slave Ship, however, does highlight the ways
in which sailors, captains, and ship owners treated human beings as commodities and sought
to derive maximum profit from their investment. Examples include sailors altering the physical
appearance of captives in preparation for the market, and, in some cases, throwing enslaved
persons overboard in an attempt to benefit from an insurance policy. Rediker also engages
with a number of important historiographical debates here. He seeks to avoid the “violence of
abstraction” resulting from an over-reliance on quantitative sources, and argues against the
concept of “social death” through his descriptions of experiences aboard ship. To that end, this
work, like Saltwater Slavery, reminds readers of the brutality of commodification that occurred
not only in ledgers and account books, but also on the ships and in the factories of the transAtlantic slave trade. [Zack Dorner]
Curto, José C. Enslaving Spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian Alcohol Trade at Luanda and
its Hinterlands, c. 1550-1830. Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2004.
This book focuses on the role of alcohol in underpinning the export slave trade linking the
economies of Brazil, Portugal and West Central Africa. First Portuguese wine and, from the
seventeenth century on, Brazilian sugar cane rum (jeritiba), became crucial goods in the trade
for Angolan slaves. Curto shows, for example, that the introduction of foreign intoxicating
beverages was a deliberate strategy on the part of merchant capitalists to erode African social
cohesion and diminish resistance to enslavement. Through the prism of the alcohol trade,
he also discusses the financing of the transatlantic trade and its profitability, the processes
through which trade relations were built and the impact of international commerce in the Luanda
hinterland. Enslaving Spirits is a thorough and rare study of the relationship between a Brazilian
commodity and the process of slaving in Africa. [Isadora Mota]
Morgan, Hiram. "The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–1575." The
Historical Journal 28.02 (1985): 261-78.
Morgan’s article offers insights into the economic and political beginnings of the English
colonial project by recounting a failed plantation attempt in northern Ireland by diplomat Sir
Thomas Smith. Not the first or last attempt at English private colonization in early modern
Ireland, Smith’s “Enterprise of Ulster” predicted future efforts by English officials and nobles to
subdue Gaelic communities and establish political hegemony in their wake. Though ultimately
confounded by bureaucratic difficulties and native Irish resistance, Smith’s attempt is of interest
to historians of the early transatlantic and colonial economy particularly because of its professed
motivations. Evidently a student of Thomas More, Smith couched his justifications of the project
in terms borrowed from Utopia, arguing that the plantations of Ireland served the “commonweal”
of an overpopulated English metropolis. As we have seen this is far from the only time that
More’s language, if not arguments, were invoked in service of colonial ends. Morgan’s article
succinctly characterizes the competing thoughts, ideologies and motivations that accompanied
England’s nascent quest for empire. He argues convincingly that the plantations of Ireland must
be understood as a crucial step in the development of England’s transatlantic polity and “the
expansion of Europe,” foreshadowing the colonial economy and the establishment of the slave
trade (261). [John Delea]
Sparks, Randy J. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Randy Sparks tells a remarkable story about two African princes as they navigate eighteenthcentury Atlantic norms of race, commerce, and slaving. The two princes are slave traders
who themselves get sold into slavery after disputes with Atlantic merchants. Despite their high
station, several captains sell them out. As black skin is by this point associated with slavery to
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many their prospects seem grim. What is remarkable is that they manage to use their money
and connections to escape slavery and return to Africa. Perhaps more remarkable is that they
resume a life of selling slaves when they do so. Their story thus offers a fascinating glimpse
at the relationship between capital, group membership, and slavery. If disembeddedness from
traditional communities is a feature of capitalism, the slave trade and the princes of Calabar
offer an interesting case: Africans were forced into a created pan-African identity as black
slaves as part of the process of commodification. That identity nearly landed two aristocrats as
slaves. When they escaped - thanks to capital - they felt no allegiance to their “race” to cease
trading, but instead continued to act in their own interests, selling those they viewed as others
for their enrichment. Is this a sign of modern slavery, or of a resistance to the modern trade in
African slaves and retention of old identities? [Mookie Kideckel]
Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American
Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly 53:2 (April 1996): 251288.
With this article, Berlin reverses the traditional progression of an African slave’s relation to
North America. Instead of presenting a narrative in which Africans were brought to North
America and subsequently became creoles, a narrative that Berlin associates with the largescale labor demands of a plantation economy (mid to late 18th century), Berlin focuses on
an earlier period when Atlantic trading factories produced creoles who were enslaved and
shipped to North America depending on the imperial vicissitudes of the time (17th and early
18th century). Products of sexual intercourse between European traders and African women
on the Atlantic littoral, these Atlantic Creoles had access to a unique combination of cultural and
linguistic skills that allowed some of them to achieve great personal success as intermediaries.
Atlantic Creole communities proliferated all over the Atlantic rim, drawn by the trade networks
and increased European settlement in the New World. Creoles were the first slaves of African
descent sent to North America, and their status as intermediaries let them retain a degree of
freedom and comfort during their captivity. However, slaves shipped from the African interior
to work New World plantations overwhelmed the creole population, and the more distinct racial
politics that came with them subsumed creole identity. [Henk Isom]
Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 15501835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
The product of more than twenty years of research, this book is considered one of the most
important studies on colonial Brazil. Stuart Schwartz traces the history of sugar production
since the early sixteenth century and examines its seminal role in the formation of Brazilian
slave society. Schwartz is one of the first historians to examine the sugar economy from
the perspective of slaves and to argue against the alleged incompatibility of slave labor and
industrial organization and technological advance. He covers a wide range of themes that will
interest early modern scholars: forms of land ownership, costs and profits of running sugar
mills, economic cycles, international markets’ fluctuations, use of slave and free labor, and
the conflicted relationship between Brazilian planters and the Portuguese crown. Schwartz
concludes that the failure of sugar to produce sustained growth laid not in the deficiencies
or unprofitability of slave labor, but in fiscal state policies and the dependent nature of the
commercial organization of the staple. [Isadora Mota]
Breen, T.H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of
the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
In Tobacco Culture, T.H. Breen draws a direct line between the cultivation of tobacco on the
great plantations of Virginia and the culture and perspective of the men who owned those
plantations. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is a major figure in Breen’s work. The weed
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infused all aspects of the planters’ lives. They judged their personal and social worth by their
success in the tobacco business. As growing tobacco led to a common mentality among
those planters that emphasized personal autonomy, when they fell into debt to British creditors
the anxiety connected to this debt led them to join the American Revolutionary movement.
Of course, Breen admits that he cannot prove this statement and thus cannot claim it. Still,
Tobacco Culture is pertinent to this course, and to this week, because in addition to a lived
culture and manner of thinking, Breen establishes that tobacco provided the political economy
of the Virginia planters – through their dealings with British merchants and their political beliefs –
the vulnerability of contributed to Revolution in the Tidewater. [Henk Isom]
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Enlightenment Political Economy
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural
Historians,” American Historical Review 115 (December 2010): 1342-1363.
Sophus Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and
Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115 (December 2010): 1395-1425.
Economic Sentiments won out over Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
(2010) and Joel Mokyr’s Enlightened Economy (2010). The classic book best known to nonspecialists is Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before its Triumph (1977); like Rothschild, it involves a lot of quotes and not a lot of
context. For the basic biographies of Smith and his successors, Robert Heilbronner’s Worldly
Philosophers (1953-) remains viable, but also see Jerry Muller’s The Mind and the Market
(2003). One could also consult the essays in Warren J. Samuels et al.,eds., A Companion to the
History of Economic Thought (2007). By one account, the most important book in a generation
on eighteenth-century political economy is Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade (2005); it looks
a little daunting at 500+ pages, but perhaps the introduction is worth a look. French political
economy has gotten a lot of recent attention, especially as related to the Revolution: Michael
Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge (2007) on public credit; John Shovlin’s The Political Economy
of Virtue (2007) on luxury; and Paul Cheney’s Revolutionary Commerce (2010), a study of the
French Atlantic that is willfully indifferent to slavery. Anoush Terjanian’s forthcoming Commerce
in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought should be more attentive to the ironies of a
slave-powered doux commerce, while Susan Buck-Morss, Hegal, Haiti, and Universal History
(2009) and Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997) indicate why political philosophy of this
era is incomprehensible without slavery front and central. Also along these lines would be
Paul Gilroy generally, and specifically Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment,” Social
History 31 (February 2006). Rebecca Spang will soon publish Stuff and Money in the Time of
the French Revolution, but in the meantime see her essay in the special issue on “Money and
the Enlightenment” in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 31:1 (winter 2005) and her
syllabus on currency and culture.
For more on Adam Smith, see Keith Tribe, “‘Das Adam Smith Problem’ and the Origins of
Modern Smith Scholarship,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008) [this is about 19th c. debates
about Smith in Germany and fairly obscure], and the excellent riff on one of Smith’s key
examples in Jaap Harskamp, “In Praise of Pins: From Tool to Metaphor,” History Workshop
Journal 70 (2010). See also Amartya Sen, “Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith,” History of
Political Economy 43 (2011). For where Smith figures (or doesn’t) in early US political economy,
Drew McCoy’s Elusive Republic (1981) remains indispensable. Potentially interesting is Allan
Potofsky, “The Political Economy of the French-American Debt Debate: The Ideological Uses of
Atlantic Commerce, 1787-1800,” WMQ 63 (July 2006): 489-516.
Enlightenment political economy altered the meaning of poverty, and one did not need to be
Foucault to see the ways in which projects of surveillance and social discipline figured in the
emergence of market capitalism. A recent account comparing Russia and Britain is Alessandro
Stanziani, “The Traveling Panopticon,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009).
See also Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism
(2001); Thomas Horne, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605-
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1834 (1990); and Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? (2004). Michael Meranze’s
Laboratories of Virtue (1996) remains the most useful for the postrevolutionary US. The social
history of the impoverished is an entirely different discussion, not covered here.
The late-eighteenth century also generated radical possibilities for rethinking property relations,
especially in works like Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1796). See Seth Cotlar, “Radical
Conceptions of Economic Equality and Property Rights in the Early American Republic: The
Trans-Atlantic Dimension,” Explorations in Early American Culture v. 4 (2000); or Cotlar’s Tom
Paine’s America (2011); or Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle
to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (2004). For less radical
possibilities, see Margaret Jacob and Matthew Kadane (Brown PhD), “Missing Now Found in
the Eighteenth Century: Weber’s Protestant Capitalist,” AHR 108 (February 2003).
If the key to Rothschild’s argument is empathy, then it seems imperative to talk about
humanitarianism and capitalism as concurrent developments in the eighteenth century.
This is the subject of the famed debate between David Brion Davis, Thomas Haskell, and
John Ashworth over the nature of British antislavery. These exchanges were collected in
Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate (1992). For our purposes the key essays are
Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, parts 1 &2,” AHR 90 (April &
June 1985). Haskell argues that capitalism is in essence a cognitive style. The market sees
the triumph of the self-regulated promise keeper, the man who trusts and counts on people
he shares no blood, family, or community ties with. Remote trust on a day-to-day basis makes
people feel powerful to control events far away, making it harder to be indifferent. Capitalism
doesn’t cause abolition, but it is a precondition to abolition. Haskell talks about Oxfam,
Amnesty International, vegetarianism, and a series of contemporary analogies in stressing the
relationship between what we ought to do and what we see ourselves capable of doing.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for Capitalism
before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1977.
Hirschman examines the writings of several influential European thinkers in the seventeenth to
eighteenth century, uncovering their conceptions of economic growth and commercial activity.
He argues that scholars in this period believed that the countervailing “passions” experienced
by each individual could be pitted against each other and thus transmogrified into virtues.
During the Middle Ages the focus was primarily on the passion of ambition, which was to be
transformed into honor and glory. As capitalistic practices became more widespread the
focus shifted from ambition to greed, which was to be turned into the more virtuous “interest.”
This understanding proved a very useful basis to justify capitalism as seen in Montesquie’s
exemplifying formulation of doux commerce as a method to keep base instincts in check. In
other words, moderation and gentility could result from avarice and self-interest, an argument
that presaged the very influential thought of Adam Smith. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
McCoy, Drew. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel
Hill: UNC Press, 1980.
Modern social realities challenged classical republicanism in the years following the American
Revolution. McCoy analyzes the Jeffersonian vision for political economy, which he argues
was the dominant strand of republican thought, to show how Americans conceived of and
implemented solutions to this crisis. Jeffersonians believed that the key was to develop
through space rather than time, thus staving off the over-civilization that accompanied a
nation’s transition from agriculture to large-scale manufacturing (like Britain). In this light, the
Louisiana Purchase provided the perfect solution. The new nation would have abundant land
and its citizens would remain virtuous, self-sufficient yeoman farmers. These farmers, though,
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depended on European markets, and this economic vision required massive federal upkeep.
Jeffersonians went to war in 1812 to secure free trade, and while the war ended without a
clear winner, Jeffersonian political economy lost out to a Hamiltonian manufacturing society.
This book does an excellent job balancing intellectual debates and contradictions with material
reality. [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement”
of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Modern Britain was just as much a product of “processes of empire” as modern India, New
Zealand, and Barbados argues Richard Drayton. In Nature’s Government he examines both the
intellectual history of botany and its value to the British state in facilitating the optimal usage of
natural resources. As European governments sought wealth from plants in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the emerging science of botany became increasingly linked to political
economy. Kew and Britain’s botanic stations were central to this process as new ideas of
political economy combining economics and science spread through the British botanic network
in service of commerce. Of particular interest to Drayton are the individual interactions at both
the center and periphery that facilitated the development of mutual knowledge across the British
Empire. To that end, the book traces the spread of Enlightenment principles, emphasizing the
Enlightenment as a global, rather than European, phenomenon by the nineteenth century.
While Smithian free trade eventually came to predominate, according to Drayton, a range of
political economies nonetheless existed on the imperial periphery during this period. Nature’s
Government stresses the importance of Britain’s botanical exchange and uses this framework to
explore the relationship between center and periphery and the reach of British ideas of political
economy and scientific improvement. [Zack Dorner]
Foley, Duncan K. Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2006.
Economic analyses typically conceptualize the economic sphere of life as distinct from the
social, political, and moral sphere. Duncan Folley presents how, starting with Adam Smith, the
exclusion of the messier domain of politics, ethics, and morals has enabled economists to not
only present parsimonious and law-like determinate arguments but also make claims about
social life that are self-contradictory and fundamentally opposed to how humans act. “Adam’s
Fallacy” refers to Smith’s contradictory notion that self-interest and selfishness somehow
transform to an overall social good in capitalist societies. Folley argues that Smith is not only
able to claim this by separating the economic from the ethical or the moral but also Smith never
provides a valid logical argument as to why this may be so. Instead, Smith goes a step further to
exploit this conceptual split by conveniently moving between a labor theory of value to a
different (adding-up) theory of value based on a set of beliefs to support his economic
arguments in the The Wealth of Nations. Folley presents how others such as Malthus have
made more fallacious claims—charity or support to the poor makes them poorer since it
encourages procreation leading to a fall in wages—by, again, considering the economic sphere
as a distinct sphere, governed by a set of “objective” laws. He similarly examines the basic
tenets of political economy presented by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Jevons, Keynes, and
Hayek to show how classical and neoclassical economists have all fallen for this dualistic view
of social life and have gone to make grand claims. However, Folley argues, a deeper
investigation into these claims reveals just how gloomy a science the study of political economy
and its contemporary version, economics, really is. Like Emma Rothschild’s argument in
Economic Sentiments, that at the very core there is an optimistic hope in capitalism held by
economists since Adam Smith, Folley’s book is useful because it shows why economics, much
to chagrin of mainstream economists, is “at its most abstract and interesting level a speculative
philosophical discourse, not a deductive or inductive science.” [Puneet Bhasin]
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Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (Facsimile
edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Karl Marx. Capital: Volume I in 13
video lectures by David Harvey. http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/.
This is an easy one. No article, book, assessment, roundtable or argument about The Wealth
of Nations, neoclassical economics, Marxism or “all the rest of it” is as illuminating or informative
as reading the real thing. Smith’s classic is a fantastic primary source and a brilliant piece of
literature. His understanding of ecology, agriculture and social organization resided alongside
a coherent global perspective. Read the long, hefty Chicago version, spend a few weeks with
David Harvey’s breakdown of Capital, and only then can a historian of capitalism write her
own essay about these classic works. Sorry. There is no better way than to probe the heart
of the matter. And at its basic level, The Wealth of Nations can no longer be an appropriation
of neoclassical economics or America’s right wing – because they haven’t studied these texts
either. [Bryan Knapp]
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The Industrial Revolution
Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (1944;
reprint Boston: Beacon Books, 2001), chapters 6-10.
Edward Baptist, “The Whipping Machine,” unpublished paper presented at “Slavery’s Capitalism:
A New History of American Economic Development,” April 2011.
My goal was to focus on technological innovation and the material processes of making things- issues that don’t come into focus until the second half of R.C. Allen’s book. A more direct
approach would have been Maxine Berg, Age of Manufactures (1986). For a multi-century and
comparative account, see Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (1993)
or Gavin Weightman, Industrial Revolutionaries (2007). William Rosen’s The Most Powerful
Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention (2010) veers towards “the rise of
the west” in its celebration of intellectual property. American historians are presently grappling
with David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods (2010), in which small New England villages foster
the design innovation and accelerated production that allowed for a middle-class consumer
revolution. Studies focusing on US manufacturing include Paul Rivard, A New Order of Things
(2002) and Judith McGaw, ed., Early American Technology (1994), which contain a most
amazing bibliography organized by industry. David R. Meyer, a Brown sociologist, has written
a great deal about American industrialization, including this encyclopedia essay. Allen is
particularly enthusiastic about Paul David’s Technical Choice, Innovation, and Economic Growth
(1975); and for purposes of teaching, David’s “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American
Economic Review 75 (1985) is a classic on path dependency. One might survey journals
like Technology & Culture or Isis for new work such as Nina Lerman’s very useful article on
the gender and racial biases in discussions of innovation and manufacturing [“Categories of
Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology,”
Technology & Culture 51 (October 2010)] or Paul Lucier’s essay on scientific expertise in the
commercial marketplace [“The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,”
Isis 100 (2009)]. The issue of piracy and intellectual property is the subject of Adrian Johns’s
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2010) and Doron Ben-Atar’s
Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (2004).
For the last thirty or forty years, most scholars have encountered industrial transformation
not from the history of technology perspective, but rather through labor and social history,
a development undoubtedly attesting to the impact of E.P. Thompson. Books that I found
especially compelling include: William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade
and French Society, 1750-1900 (1984); Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (1995);
and Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods (1992). Joyce Burnette’s Gender, Work, and Wages in
Industrial Revolution Britain (2008) was the subject of a recent forum in Social Science History
33 (winter 2009). The book I really wanted to assign this week (had it remained in print) was
Richard Biernacki’s Fabrication of Labor (1995), a comparison of textile production in Germany
and Britain that connects culturally-specific notions of labor as commodity to shopfloor practices.
Baptist’s conceptualization of plantation slavery as industrial advances the “Second Slavery”
paradigm introduced by Dale Tomich (in relation to Cuba) and elaborated for Brazil, Louisiana,
and elsewhere at a 2010 conference at SUNY-Binghamton. Historians had long accepted
the notion that slavery was inherently incompatible with industrial production, but examples
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of “industrial slaves” are numerous [see Charles Dew’s books or T. Stephen Whitman’s article
on the Maryland Chemical Works in Journal of Southern History 57 (1993)]. Second Slavery
focuses on the plantation as agro-industrial space; see Anthony Kaye’s overview in Journal of
Southern History 75 (2009). The relationship of slavery to 19th century US capitalism was the
subject of a 2011 Brown-Harvard conference and the subject of my essay, “The Unfree Origins
of American Capitalism” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America (2006). I take
another stab at this in Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (March 2012). The plantation as a site of
business (management and accounting) innovation is discussed in Caitlin Rosenthal’s recent
Harvard dissertation, as well as in Bill Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies,”
Journal of Management Studies 40 (December 2003); Marcel van der Linden, “Re-Constructing
the Origins of Modern Labor Management,” Labor History 51 (2010); Richard Fleischman, David
Oldroyd, and Thomas Tyson, “Plantation Accounting and Management Practices in the US and
the British West Indies at the End of their Slavery Eras,” Economic History Review 64 (2011);
and Fleischman, Oldroyd, and Tyson, “Monetising Human Life: Slave Valuations on US and
British West Indian Plantations,” Accounting History 9 (2004).
Long ago, Eric Williams argued that industrialization’s profits in Britain made West Indian
slavery expendable. Scholars like Seymour Drescher contested these claims outright, while
John Ashworth (in the debate with Haskell) posited a more complicated route from capitalism
to antislavery, as the wage labor economy resulted in the valorization of the middle-class
family which in turn resulted in a critique of slavery as violating the sanctity of both white and
black families. All of which is to say, the exact relationship of slavery to capitalism (as catalyst,
corrosive, etc.) remains very much debatable. But few pieces I’ve read in the last decade have
the power of Baptist’s “Whipping Machine.” See also Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial
Revolution in England (2002); Nicholas Draper’s Price of Emancipation (2011) shows how
Caribbean slaves figured in nineteenth-century British finance, especially annuities and trusts.
Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy.
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Mokyr reclaims for economic historians knowledge about the natural world from historians
of science. He argues that a widening base of knowledge was responsible for the economic
changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. For Mokyr, the Industrial Revolution was a
Western, not a British, phenomenon. In fact, Britain’s leadership in technological innovations
mattered little; instead reduction in access cost to knowledge throughout Europe made the
difference. During the European Enlightenment the proscriptive base (knowledge about the
natural world) widened, which supported the sustained development of new, "useful" techniques
(prescriptive knowledge), such as efficient cotton mills and coals mines. For the first time in
human history, technological development was able to sustain itself because there were enough
people who continually questioned how technology worked. While Mokyr stresses diffusion
of information as fundamental to economic growth, his interpretation is limited to a fairly
small “enlightened” elite. It was these men who competed in a market for ideas. Their winning
ideas survived, but we get little sense of how the state and the people ensured their survival.
[Lindsay Schakenbach]
Tomich, Dale. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy.
Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
In this book, Dale Tomich examines the making of the capitalist world-economy during the
nineteenth century ‘through the prism of slavery’. His approach is two-folded: he studies not only
the asymmetrical insertion of specific slave systems in the international order, but also rethinks
the development of capitalism from a New World perspective. Tomich criticizes long-standing
approaches to the political economy of slavery - namely the new economic history, Marxism and
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the world-systems theory – for providing models that do not account for the interplay between
local histories and larger structural transformations. Thus Tomich articulates a new theoretical
framework centered on the concept of “second slavery”: he argues that British industrialization
sparked a reformulation of slave relations in the Americas which shifted economic gains from
old slave zones to Cuba and the North American cotton south. This new cycle of heightened
exploitation of bound labor, however, was not solely dictated by the development of industrial
capitalism. Taking the French colony of Martinique as an example, Tomich argues that struggles
over the organization of work and labor discipline in New World plantations also contributed to
the global economic transformation that replaced direct colonial domination as the main strategy
for capital accumulation in the modern world. The ‘second slavery’ world is one in which the
most powerful nations are the ones who control the economic flow of commodities. [Isadora
Mota]
Sewell Jr, William. H. “Artisans, Factory Workers, and the Formation of the French
Working Class, 1789–1848.” In Working-Class Formation. Nineteenth-Century Patterns in
Western Europe and the United States ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, 45–70.
Princeton, Princeton University Press. 1986.
Contrary to Marxist theorization, Sewell presents how it was in early 19th century France that
we interestingly see the earliest formulation of a working class, not by British type factory
workers but instead by artisans! The French economy of the 18th and 19th century exemplified
artisanal corporatism—exclusionary associations consisting of master craftsmen and workers—
under tight regulations by the crown for discipline and internal solidarity. However, internal
solidarity did not mean class-consciousness amongst ‘French’ workers because it did not cut
across corporations or even if it did, it did not go beyond the same trade. While the French
Revolution transformed the political economy by ‘liberating’ workers from under a corporatist
structure, Sewell argues that it did not lead to class formation straightaway due to lingering
visions of corporatism. It was not until the political struggles following the July 1830 revolution
when artisanal workers began to use a new idiom and revolutionary political discourse to
articulate ‘association’ and a ‘right to association,’ which for them was inseparable from the
demands of “Liberté,” that a sense of brotherhood developed across previously corporatist
boundaries. Although, this sense of brotherhood did not transcend across to textile factory
workers immediately, the articulation of artisanal worker experiences as reasons for demanding
their right to association, now outside of a corporatist structure, struck a chord with factory
workers as well. Eventually, Sewell argues that we not only see the emergence of a class
conscious all-encompassing labor movement standing in solidarity with each other but also as
part of this process, a ‘French working class’ identity emerges by the end of the 19th century.
[Puneet Bhasin]
Fenoaltea, Stefano. "Peeking Backward: Regional Aspects of Industrial Growth in PostUnification Italy." The Journal of Economic History 63.04 (2003): 1059-1102.
Italian historians and politicians have long debated the origins of the economic divergence
between the country’s heavily industrial north and agricultural south. Stefano Fenoaltea
addresses the divisive issue in this article with special attention to decadal census data and
estimates of regional industrial production from 1871 to 1911. What he finds is not a profound
difference in relative industrialization between northern and southern regions in the immediate
post-Unification period but rather a seeming economic parity. Nowhere evident, for example,
is the later dominant status of the cities of the northern “industrial triangle,” Turin, Milan and
Genoa. He argues that the Mezzogiorno’s later economic lag cannot be attributed to preUnification cultural mores as some have claimed but rather to these regions’ inability to keep
industrial growth in step with population growth. In the north where terrain and geographic
factors were more amenable to industrial development, cities and factory towns came to grow
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at a rate that their southern counterparts could not match even at the turn of the century. As a
study of the “late arrival” of industrial capitalism to Italy, Fenoaltea’s article is an interesting and
provocative piece of revisionist history.[John Delea]
Shammas, Carole. The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990.
Shammas begins her work with the statement that being poor and being a consumer were
not mutually exclusive conditions. From that starting point her work examines consumption,
particularly that of non-elites, in the two centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution in
Britain circa 1800. Rather than as a period of stasis, Shammas presents the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as a period of active and fluctuating consumption available to a wide range
of individuals.To that end, she focuses on three key questions in examining consumer trends
pre-1800: demand, standards of living, and distribution. Both the rich and the poor, whether
malnourished or well nourished, were able to participate in consumer culture by the eighteenth
century. While consumptive patterns had previously rested upon trickle-down consumerism
from local elites, the decline of this hierarchical system in the seventeenth century allowed
laborers and servants more consumer choice leading up to 1800, especially in terms of access
to groceries and semi-durables. This book fits in with the growing historiography of the early
modern Consumer Revolution, yet Shammas also challenges the bevy of consumer revolutions
that have been proclaimed by historians. Instead, she emphasizes the slow development of
consumer society before the Industrial Revolution. An exploration of individual demand and the
evolution of consumer choice form the core of Shammas’ work; however, she also addresses
larger questions of consumer demand’s influence on the early modern British state. The British
government increasingly came to rely on revenues from import duties, excises, and taxes; and
trade became a key justification for imperial expansion in this period. [Zack Dorner]
David, Paul A. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.” American Economic Review 75
(1985): 332-338.
David uses the development of the QWERTY keyboard arrangement as an example of the
principle of path-dependency, a sequence of economic changes in which “important influences
upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings
dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces.” Path dependencies are
important to understand not least because they subvert common methods for understanding
history and economics: they do not lend themselves to rational analysis or modeling. The
story of the QWERTY arrangement’s popularity, in spite of it being demonstrably less efficient
than other arrangements, reveals that it resulted from “technical interrelatedness”, “economies
of scale”, and “quasi-irreversibility of investment.” Translated from econo-speak this means
that the QWERTY setup was invented to get around early technological impediments, mass
produced by a complex web of connected producers in that form and, from that point on,
preserved because it had been invested in heavily by both consumers and producers. [Oddný
Helgadóttir]
Rood, Daniel. “Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the
Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,
Irvine, 2010.
This is a fascinating dissertation that explores how industrial knowledge was produced in
nineteenth-century slave societies. Rood focuses on transnational networks of “industrial
experts” in the U.S. South, Cuba and Brazil and, in so doing, expands the sociology of the
plantation to include “plantation technocrats” such as chemists, machinists, engineers, and
statisticians alongside slaves. Rood’s work challenges scholars to revise the role of slavery
in the development of industrial capitalism. Arguing that plantations were also sites for the
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development of new sciences of capitalist commodity production, Rood creatively demonstrates
how slavery needs to be understood not as a precedent to, but rather as an integral part of
capitalism’s maturity. [Isadora Mota]
Hoppit, Julian. Risk and Failure in English Business 1700-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987.
Hoppit’s principal goals here are twofold. First, he identifies the study of bankruptcy as a
means to add complexity to narratives of economic growth, decay, and structural change
in eighteenth-century England. As Hoppit demonstrates, rapidly developing sectors of the
English economy, such as overseas trade and the cotton and woolen industries, saw a rise in
bankruptcy in the eighteenth century as businessmen began to take more risks and competition
became more intense. A history of bankruptcy then, suggests Hoppit, helps clarify the close
relationship between failure and growth in the long process of capitalist development. Second,
Hoppit identifies businessmen (distributors), not producers or consumers, as active agents of
change who linked disparate parts of the economy. Throughout the book Hoppit pays particular
attention to the risk avoidance strategies and speculation tactics that shaped competition in
English business. Ultimately, the narrative of industrial or capitalist development is not a story of
heroes like Wedgwood and Arkwright, but rather a series of mistakes, missed opportunities, and
failures. What better way to capture this tortuous path than through an exploration of bankruptcy
and failure. [Zack Dorner]
Genovese, Eugene. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and
Society of the Slave South. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
It does not matter whether he was wrong or right, I feel it is my duty to bring a critical scholar
and his classic oeuvre back into the conversation about slavery and capitalism. If students of
political economy and slavery should still read Eric Williams, then certainly Eugene Genovese
plays a role in our education. His Roll, Jordan, Roll may have overplayed culture-building and
slave agency within slave society, at times making slavery seem a viable way of life for slaves.
But his work overall, including Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the
Rise and Expansion of Capitalism; The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the
Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview; The Political Economy of Slavery, and The World the
Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, together provide a more comprehensive
understanding of the entire, holistic story of slavery embedded in larger economic and social
systems. He argued in The Political Economy of Slavery that southern plantation slavery was
incompatible with expanding market capitalism. Today scholars recognize the North and South
within a growing Atlantic capitalism system: we note connections between New England mills,
New York money, and southern-grown cotton. This new perspective is excellent, of course.
But Genovese’s thinking, and his critique, cannot be ignored. Genovese’s study detailed many
of the convergences discussed in the history of capitalism seminar, namely political economy of
capitalism, state power, resource exploitation, and global connections. He wrote that
comprehending a “fully developed capitalist system,” required “full attention to the role of
politics, and especially state power, in assuring the ruling class an adequate command over its
resources, including labor, and an adequate share of the international market.” Furthermore, he
highlighted that everything in cotton-commodity production was tied to sun, soil, growth, and
movement. Note but one example, especially the chapter “Cotton, Slavery, and Soil
Exhaustion.” He wrote that “Slavery and the plantation system led to agricultural metthods that
depleted the soil. The frontier methods of the free states yielded similar results, but slavery
forced the South into continued dependence upon exploitative methods after the frontier had
passed further west. It prevented reclamation of worn- out lands. The plantations were much too
large to fertilize easily. Lack of markets and poor care of animals by slaves made it impossible
to accumulate sufficient manure. The low level of capital accumulation made the purchase of
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adequate quantities of commercial fertilizer unthinkable. Planters could not practice proper crop
rotation, for the pressure of the credit system kept most available land in cotton, and the labor
force could not easily be assigned to the required tasks without excessive costs of supervision”
Add this particular insight to his study of emerging cities such as Atlanta, planter fears of poor
whites, and the particularities of southern railroad construction and those studying capitalism
begin to understand more about the difficulties of a North-South capitalist system. [Bryan Knapp]
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Institutional Regimes
Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Naomi Lamoreaux and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Legal Regime and Contractual Flexibility: A
Comparison of Business’s Organizational Choices in France and the United States during the Era
of Industrialization,” American Law and Economics Review 7 (Spring 2005): 28-61.
Colleen Dunlavy, “Mirror Images: Political Structure and Early Railroad Policy in the United States
and Prussia,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Spring 1991): 1-35.
This week’s other contenders were Morton J. Horowitz’s classic Transformation of American
Law (1977) [see this useful appraisal on eh.net] or the recent-- and massive-- Christopher
Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America,
1580-1865 (2010). Belated Feudalism is a seminal text in American Political Development
(APD), the historically-minded subfield of political science associated with Orren and Stephen
Skowronek (see their 2004 book), Theda Skocpol, and the journal Studies in American Political
Development. The focus on legal regimes and the state’s administrative capacity connects
this conversation to the New Institutional Economics, an economics subfield attentive to rules,
customs, and norms that govern transactions. Only within the last few years has “political
economy” become the umbrella term for historians studying the structures of capitalism with
the basic assumption that markets don’t exist in a vacuum. For the American discussion,
see Richard John et al. in Journal of Policy History 18 (2006) [reprinted as a book entitled
Ruling Passions in 2010] and John et al. in the “Bringing Political Economy Back In” forum
in Enterprise & Society 9 ( September 2008). Robin Einhorn’s two books-- one on property
and one on taxation-- are exemplary. William Novak’s People’s Welfare (1996) demolishes
the premise of a nineteenth-century laissez-faire state, with particular attention to municipal
marketplace regulation. Brian Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight (2009) also writes the
national government back into the story. See also the “Sanctity of Property in American
Economic History” by the U-Mass economist Gerald Friedman or Naomi Lamoreaux’s “The
Mystery of Property Rights” in Journal of Economic History 71 (2011).
The study of capitalism in the nineteenth-century US has gone through several incarnations:
a 1970s and 1980s “transition to capitalism” debate, a 1990s and 2000s “Market Revolution”
framework, and now “political economy of capitalism.” The new book to consult is Michael
Zakim and Gary Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command (2012). I would be delighted to
see some accessible books written on banking and finance, joining Stephen Mihm’s Nation
of Counterfeiters (2007) and Jane Kamensky’s Exchange Artist (2008). These books, along
with Scott Sandage’s Born Losers (2005) and Edward Balleisen’s Navigating Failure (2001),
have made failure as key as success to understanding the contours of capitalism. Sharon
Murphy’s Investing in Life (2010) considers the financial dimension of the life insurance industry;
while John Fabian Witt and Jamie Bronstein have explored tort law related to workplace
injuries. Caitlin Rosenthal has a great Common-place essay on accounting and the culture of
capitalism. The upcoming Capitalism by Gaslight conference captures the current moment in
the scholarship.
The rise of credit reporting in this era is a key topic: Hartmut Berghoff, “Civilizing Capitalism?
The Beginning of Credit Rating in the United States and Germany, Bulletin of the GHI 45 (2009);
Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial
Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008).
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Drawing upon Belated Feudalism, labor historians have devoted much attention to constraints
on “free labor” and perhaps the impossibility of the term itself. Marcel van der Linden’s Workers
of the World (2008) is fantastic, as were the essays that he and Tom Brass edited as Free and
Unfree Labour (1997). Stanley Engerman’s 1999 volume Terms of Labor also explores the
slippery terrain of labor status. Robert Steinfeld’s Invention of Free Labor (1991) and Contract,
Coercion, and Free Labor (2001) are both very useful, especially the latter’s comparison of
British and American enforcement mechanisms. Perhaps the smartest book about nineteenthcentury wage labor is Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage,
and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998).
Railroads must occupy a key place in the history of capitalism. They were the original topic
of cliometric research, exemplified by Robert Fogel’s 1964 book and central to the notion of
a “transportation revolution” that “collapsed time and space” in economic life. See the forum on
British, French, and US railroads in Social Science History 34 (summer 2010). William Cronon’s
Nature’s Metropolis (1991) remains the best book to connect transportation technology
and legal regimes to landscape. For the most recent assessment of the US “transportation
revolution” and its political consequences, see John J. Binder, “The Transportation Revolution
and Antebellum Sectional Disagreement,” Social Science History 35 (spring 2011).
North, Douglass C., and Barry R. Weingast. "Constitutions and Commitment: The
Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England." The
Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803-832.
A key argument of institutional economists, especially new institutionalists like North and
Weingast, is that efficient institutions (formal and informal rules) lead to economic growth
because they reduce the costs—transaction costs—associated with the inherent uncertainties
of economic exchange, particularly impersonal exchange. North and Weingast present how
prior to the Glorious Revolution, the Crown of England funded its expenses by regularly abusing
its powers and the common law system to arbitrarily tax and default on loans from wealthy
parliamentarians and members of society. Not only was the period leading upto the Glorious
Revolution rife with high transaction costs due to the lack of credible institutions but also it was
period of several fiscal crises. The growing discontent with the monarchy and its culmination in
the Glorious Revolution led to significant political and institutional changes that also ushered
in a fiscal revolution. North and Weigast argue that the containment of the monarchy’s powers,
the ascendancy of the parliament, and the emergence of a new fiscal system with predictable
taxation rules under the control of the parliament instituted a separation of powers such that a
balance of power between the monarchy and the parliament kept the polity and government in
check. What followed was a representative government that could not only establish rules but
also make credible commitments to enforcing rules, leading to a relatively efficient economy
with lower transaction costs. North and Weingast demonstrate how England recovered from
its fiscal crisis quickly post the revolution, and how the institutional changes contributed to the
emergence of efficient capital markets—a cornerstone of economic growth. [Puneet Bhasin]
Bortz, Jeff and Stephen H. Haber (eds). The Mexican Economy, 1870-1930: Essays on the
Economic History of Institutions, Revolution, and Growth. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002.
The contributors to this anthology of ten essays employ theoretical insights from the New
Institutional Economics as well as traditional archival methods in a study of institutional
change and economical performance in Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century. The book
focuses mostly on the reforms implemented during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876-1911),
which reignited economic growth amidst grave political instability in the country. The authors
demonstrate that state interventionism benefited only a privileged group of “asset holders”
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by restricting entry into the banking system and by artificially protecting industries in favor of
oligopolies. Economic growth, therefore, came at the cost of democracy and in detriment of
the rest of society, transforming in its path the country’s baking system, foreign trade, property
rights and labor relations. The Mexican Economy also addresses the changes ushered in
by the Mexican Revolution (1911-17), and ends with a brief overview of the immediate postrevolutionary period (1917-30). Chapter 9 by Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato is an especially
interesting example of econometrics applied to Latin American labor history. She examines
capital-labor relations in the Mexican textile industry from 1900 to 1930, and details the increase
in workers’ legal power during the revolutionary period. In so doing, Gómez-Galvarriato
compiles the first index of real wages for this period of Mexican history. The Mexican Economy
concludes with an essay by Stephen H. Harber, in which he offers the theoretical concept
of ‘crony capitalism’ to describe the oligarchic republic model finally prevalent in Mexico, one
in which corporate privileges prevented the establishment of a credible and competitive market
structure in the beginning of the twentieth century. [Isadora Mota]
Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with
Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Montgomery sets out to uncover what advantages political democracy afforded workers in the
nineteenth-century United States in comparison to those in the Old World. Working people
(and really, he means white men) sought to use their access to the powers of government
and to vibrant associational culture to preserve a community of welfare and to achieve a
sense of democratic civil identity. Yet social priorities were set by those whose accumulated
wealth enabled them to set the terms of production and whose interests were supported by the
coercive power of the police, armed forces and the judiciary. Essentially, workers traded blatant
domination to subtle oppression in the form of commodity exchange. Democracy could only do
so much to save workers from institutions that worked against them in the “free” market.
[Lindsay Schakenbach]
Beales, Derek Edward Dawson, and Eugenio F. Biagini. "Free Trade, Globalization and
the Audit of Unification, 1863-76." The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. Harlow:
Longman, 2002. 163-75.
This short chapter of Beales’ and Biagini’s book focuses on the economic justifications of
Italian unification and the problems faced by Piedmontese liberals in attempting to impose an
economic regime on the vastly incongruous regional economies of Italy. Of special interest
to the authors are the “anti-liberal” and heavily state-funded development of the Italian rail
system and the effect this process had on the “internal othering” of the Mezzogiorno in the
perception of northern elites. Far from solving all of the country’s economic weaknesses, the
Piedmontese right’s emphasis on free trade capitalism had occasionally disastrous effects on
the artisan-based industries of the South which had previously survived on high tariff protection
in the Bourbon regime. Echoing the opinions of many previous authors Beales and Biagini
characterize Italy’s economic unification/liberalization as a period of missed opportunities
aggravated by the Piedmont state’s inability to subordinate nationalistic state-building ideology
to the particular needs of regional economies especially in the south. The rhetoric of capitalists
in Milan and Turin notwithstanding, Italy’s economic troubles persisted in the face of exposure to
a global free market, as indicated by the Italian government’s later sale of nationalized railroads
and lands previously confiscated from the Church. [John Delea]
Sklansky, Jeffrey P. The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American
Thought, 1820-1920. UNC Press, 2002.
How did the American democratic ideal shift from Jefferson’s nation of yeomen farmers to a
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collective meld of opinions bound by a similar culture? Why has it been more palatable for
the past thirty years for leftist academics to discuss identity politics than land redistribution
schemes? And what does the industrial revolution have to do with any of it? Sklansky’s
ambitious intellectual history aims to answer all these questions. He sees in the phenomenon
of the last generation many links to a change in discourse that took place over the course of
the nineteenth century too. As the industrial revolution transformed the American economy
from one based on artisan production by landowners to one of renting wage-earners, Sklansky
argues that prominent thinkers redefined the basis of the American polity. They did so by
moving away from the discourse of political economy to that of social psychology. The result
was that the right to political participation and self-hood that had once been linked to possession
of property faded into a world in which democratic participation meant voicing opinions and
being linked together with people culturally - or as he uses the term “psychically.” Tracing the
work of romantics like Emerson and sociologists like George Hughes, Sklansky’s book attempts
to provide one answer to the question of why even left-leaning Americans have often accepted
the argument that right to participation in the polity is a more important marker of equality than
the right to property. [Mookie Kideckel]
Klubock, Miller. Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El
Teniente Copper Mine, 1904- 1951. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.
Klubock tells the story of how a labor force is wrought through an interaction of corporate,
state, and personal interests, revealing much about labor processes, gendered identities, and
corporate welfare initiatives in the process. In the early years of the twentieth century the
Chilean state granted the American Braden Copper Company the right to set up copper mines
in Chile’s rural El Teniente. The company, however, struggled to find a stable work force to
keep the very lucrative business running smoothly. In an attempt to create such a workforce the
company tried to make local workers, which were considered wayward and unreliable, to marry
and conform to a set of moral values such as teetotaling and monogamy. Family allowances
and social privileges, many of them aimed at women, were used as incentives. These initiatives
had little impact and both the miners and single women flouted disciplinary measures until
the onset of the Great Depression, when the precarious economic situation forced them to
abide by company policies. In the following decades the “stable” family patterns that the
company had promoted became prevalent among workers, but the result was not always as
the company had desired. Mining families soon began to work together to better the position of
miners through unionisation, strikes, and protest. Such initiatives were fueled by the “intensely
masculine” culture of the miners. Moreover, the women, most of which had married and given
up independent employment, channeled their energy into supporting their husbands’ efforts to
increase social mobility, while relying on company welfare policies to protect them from rampant
sexual and physical abuse.[Oddný Helgadóttir]
Boychuk, Gerard W. National Health Insurance in the United States and Canada: Race,
Territory, and the Roots of Difference. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
2008.
Welfare dispensation is a crucial component of government economic regimes. Boychuk
shows that the fight to provide it, especially comprehensive health insurance, has been a key
battleground in fights over both economic liberalism and political centralization. He argues that
the lack of national health insurance in the United States is directly attributable to the fight over
racial integration. The rest of the industrialized world was adopting national health insurance in
the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, but American presidents came up against strong southern opposition
when they tried to do the same thing. Some tried, notably Truman in his “fair deal” and to some
degree Johnson in his “great society.” Yet many Southern congressmen feared that federal
money for health would come with orders to desegregate medical facilities. The fact that the
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deeply segregated AMA also opposed national health insurance while the all-black National
Medical Association and the NAACP were some of its staunchest supporters further made it a
liability for southern congressmen to support. While they could have in theory “gone it alone,”
without federal cost sharing measures few states could afford a comprehensive program. In
Canada, that federal cost sharing was key to convincing provinces to adopt public health care
programs. But there the game of one-upmanship between provincial and federal governments
led to health care: most of the signifcant health care legislation was adopted following bouts of
Quebec nationalism, in which Ottawa wanted to gain allegiance to the national project. It was
a similar mode, almost, to the fight in the United States (cf Klein, For All These Rights) between
employers and the government for the right to provide welfare benefits. Evidently, group identity
had a large impact on the formation of seemingly disconnected economic and social regimes.
[Mookie Kideckel]
Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Considering human temporality, the rising and setting sun is inexorable, as is the flow of the
Susquehanna into Baltimore Harbor, waves in the Chesapeake Bay, and the movement of ships
from and to the city that was the focus of historian Seth Rockman’s case study. Ineluctable,
too, was the flow of shit from too many horses in this burgeoning urban space, and constant
sediment accruing in the harbor – realities of dynamic motion that gave rise to the primary
sources in Scraping By. Rockman highlighted the underpaid, unfree labor that went into the
development of Baltimore’s infrastructure, in addition to the capital that exploited this labor. “No
amount of effort could stop sediment filling up Baltimore’s harbor,” Rockman noted, but also “no
amount of labor could guarantee a decent living to men on the mudmachine.” The mudmachine
allowed Baltimore to happen, as did the daily toil on it. As with Braudel’s Mediterranean, we can
see labor, capital, machine and urban development, as well as rivers, mud, earth movements,
and photosynthesis yielding grain for people, oats for horses, and manure flowing through the
entire system. At numerous points in Scraping By, Rockman illuminated global connections,
through geographical combinations, demographics, commodity flows, and credit systems.
Equally numerous were continual reminders of the materiality of sedimentation and flow, a
global, ecological, Braudelian nonmarket reality. These nonmarket entities at times acted as
competitive advantage, and at times as constant obstacles to overcome. Rockman’s analysis
focused on legible technologies like the mudmachine and the almshouse, both of which left
records. But what was the mudmachine? Why did it exist? It dredged Baltimore’s harbor,
prone to constant sedimentation, so that the “third largest city” in the early Republic could
engage its vision of a commercial entrepot, a necessary trading zone for the Atlantic, and,
as understood by its commodity movements, ties with Asia as well. Thus, the mudmachinists
would not have possessed their jobs, nor would their records have existed, without tying the
harbor to the Chesapeake, the Atlantic and the rest of the world. This larger vision illuminated
the very meaning of people’s lives, their social relations as dictated by new capitalist modes of
production, divisions of labor, and the necessary legal and economic means to consolidate local
power – all of them explicitly, profoundly, and inextricably tied to a larger web of relations. [Bryan
Knapp]
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The Imperial Reach
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975, reprint New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Sven Beckert, "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton
Production in the Age of the American Civil War," American Historical Review 109 (December
2004): 1405-1438.
Gregg Mitman and Paul Erickson, “Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire,”
Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 45-73.
This is a purposefully vague heading, and of course chronologically confusing since the global
expansion of capitalism had been underway for several centuries by the mid-nineteenth.
Nonetheless, I’ll accept Hobsbawm’s premise that 1850-1875 was the key moment of capitalist
consolidation over ever-expanding regions of the globe. This was certainly true in regard to US
political dominance in North America, as Patricia Limerick made clear in Legacy of Conquest
(1987), the foundational text of the “new western history”; Limerick contends that lawyers and
land speculators were far more important to the history of the American west than pioneers and
cowboys. David Igler’s Industrial Cowboys (2001) and David Vaught’s Cultivating California
(1999) provide compelling case studies. Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire (2008)
features an aggressive Indian empire that forced subordinated polities to generate wealth for the
center, but was this related to capitalism? See Alexandra Harmon et al., “Interwoven Economic
Histories: American Indians in a Capitalist America,” JAH 98 (December 2011).
On global integration, Jeremy Prestholdt’s “On the Global Repercussions of East African
Consumerism,” AHR 109 (2004) would have worked beautifully this week, connecting Salem,
Massachusetts, to Zanzibar in an unexpected way. Emancipation in the British West Indies
did not end the importance of sugar to Britain, as discussed in Richard Huzzey, “Free Trade,
Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain,” Historical Journal 53 (2010). Do latenineteenth- century commodity studies have the same explanatory value as those that have
proliferated for the early modern period? See Sucheta Mazumdar’s Sugar and Society in China
(1998). On state power to police national boundaries, see Andrew Wender Cohen, “Smuggling,
Globalization, and America’s Outward State,” Journal of American History 97 (September 2010).
The scholarship on empire-- broadly defined-- is too massive to consider comprehensively,
but my sense is that much of it takes capitalism as a given and thus devotes attention
elsewhere. One might start with Michael Adas’s work insofar as it addresses instrumental logic
and technology. Moving into the twentieth century, Emily Rosenberg’s two books would be
worthwhile, especially Financial Missionaries to the World (1999). Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia
(2009) and Julie Greene’s The Canal Builders (2009) address the expansion of US capitalism
into Latin America. Although we’ll address global labor history later in the semester, it is worth
mentioning now the degree to which indigenous labor within empire has tended to confound
traditional Marxist categories of class formation. Most famously, see Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
Rethinking Working Class History (1989) or Joel Beinin’s Workers and Peasants in the Modern
Middle East (2001).
Sharma, Jayeeta. “British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire’s
Garden.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 43:4 (2006): 429-455.
Beginning with a well-known plant transfer—that of tea from China to India—Sharma focuses
on the larger geo-political developments that necessitated intervention by the British state to
promote tea cultivation in British India. The desire to protect capital investment drove East India
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Company attempts to develop a tea industry in India after 1830 as its Chinese monopoly waned
in the nineteenth century. Sharma also addresses the question of the labor required to tend the
tea plants in a new environment in India. Not only did the EIC need to acquire tea plants, but its
Tea Committee also realized it needed to attract Chinese growers and assimilate Chinese tea
growing practices into India. Indeed, plant transfers were not simply a quest to find a plant, but
were also a matter of securing growing techniques and labor. Sharma goes on to describe the
development of a population of Indian peasants to work the new tea plantations in this period.
Like other works we have read, this article highlights the impact of a specific commodity and its
production on local economies and people. [Zack Dorner]
Lucier, Paul. Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820-90.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Scientists and Swindlers is a study of capitalism and science (and of the resources necessary
for imperial growth…although he doesn’t use the term “imperial”) in nineteenth-century
America. Lucier tracks the development of American coal and petroleum industries -- which
drew both intense scientific and industrial interest -- as well as debates over the classification
and ownership of natural resources. With extensive details about the science behind resource
extraction and the marketing travails of scientists, Lucier convincingly argues that the
exploration of coal and oil was driven by both scientific theory and commercial and political
motives. [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Goss, Andrew. The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the
Enlightenment in Indonesia. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
This book helps us move beyond the traditionally Anglo-American view of imperial reach in the
eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Goss examines the failure of Enlightenment
thought to take root in Indonesia, despite the commercial successes of economic botany there.
In so doing, Goss recognizes the physical realities of colonial administration on the periphery
of empire and confronts a question that underlies much of this week’s reading: to what extent
was science a tool of empire or the state? Naturalists in Indonesia created new scientific
institutions and knowledge in the nineteenth century, but they fell under the sponsorship
of the Dutch state. Local botanic gardens and scientists remained dependent on the Dutch
state for economic survival, Goss argues, which prevented the development of autonomous,
local scientific institutions. The naturalists, meanwhile, became a new class of what Goss
terms “floracrats, state experts of nature,” forced to work within a state-imposed system that
stripped away the independence of science to operate in non-state-sponsored spaces. Natural
science in Indonesia continued to be strictly tied to the Dutch state into the twentieth century,
which contributed to the stunted development Goss identifies during the nationalist and postindependence eras. [Zack Dorner]
Bosworth, R. J. B. "The Albanian Forests of Signor Giacomo Vismara: A Case Study of
Italian Economic Imperialism During the Foreign Ministry of Antonino Di San Giuliano."
The Historical Journal 18.03 (1975): 571-86.
Italy was a latecomer to the colonial game for obvious reasons, far more often acquiring
colonies as the result of treaties and diplomacy than by military conquest. In the wake of the
disastrous Battle of Adowa that frustrated Italian designs in Ethiopia, Italian businessmen and
bureaucrats looked to the Balkans for opportunities to expand the Italian economy and assert
Italy’s position as a regional Great Power. Bosworth’s article details one such quixotic venture.
In the Giolittian years foreign minister Antonino di San Giuliano attempted to persuade Rome to
fund a Milanese businessman in Ottoman Albania, Giacomo Vismara, with the aim of securing
cheap lumber for Italian state railroads. Aggravated by frequent changes of government in
Rome and diplomatic tensions prior to the Italo-Turkish War, San Giuliano’s subsidy project took
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years to complete and did not yield results until World War I. It ultimately foundered as the result
of a financial conflict between Vismara and an Italian government which refused to swallow the
project’s sunk costs even after the war. This story of a botched attempt at economic imperialism
is typical of Italy’s bizarre and often Pyrrhic colonial history, or in the author’s words a testimony
to “the absurdity of “Italy’s imperial pretensions and the tenacity with which those pretensions
were held (586).” [John Delea]
Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
Henry Holt and Company: New York, 2009.
In his book, Grandin tells the story of Henry Ford's hubristic business endeavor in the Brazilian
Amazon. In the 1920s Henry Ford decided to begin rubber production on a plot of land the
size of Tennessee in the center of Brazil, which his company had purchased and named
Fordlandia. This was partially in anticipation of protectionist price raises on European rubber
production and in part to fulfill Ford's fantasy of a complete and perfect cycle of production
for his automobiles. To this end Ford built an entire town around the rubber production in the
Amazon. He envisioned his workers tending to all parts of the production of his cars; spread out
over the globe but united in leading wholesome American lives. In this way, Ford styled himself
as an entrepreneur in the business of “producing men”—the cars, he suggested, were just a
propitious byproduct of this venture. Grandin portrays Ford's losing battle with the Amazonian
jungle as animated by personal hubris and blind faith that American successes, values, and
lifestyles could be replicated elsewhere. So convinced was Ford of the merit of his vision of
Fordlandia that he simply ignored the ecological, social and meteorological realities of the
jungle, on which he sought to impose a version of Midwestern idyll. In a sense, then, Fordlandia
represented Ford's desperate effort to reproduce, or perhaps preserve, an America that he saw
as under siege due to an increasingly consumerist culture at home. He conveniently ignored his
own role in fashioning this new phase of American history. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
Chomsky, Aviva. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 18701940. Louisiana: Louisiana State Press, 1995.
This book is among one of the first social histories of multinational corporations in Latin
America. Aviva Chomsky looks at the formation of an enclave economy in Costa Rica’s Atlantic
coast by the banana and railroad companies that merged to form the United Fruit Company
in 1899. She focuses on the lives of black West Indian workers in the banana industry, and
explains how they managed to build an alternative social and economic system around the
plantations despite the company’s efforts to control their lives. [Isadora Mota]
Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 18671914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.
One of the pioneering studies in Canadian imperial thought, Berger’s text links the nationalist,
imperialist, and economic values of some of Canada’s leading nineteenth century minds. He
argues that (English) Canadian nationalism was imperialism - not in the sense of dependency
on the British Empire but in being an equal partner in “the greatest empire the world has ever
seen.” This imperial outlook also informed their views of the relationship between society, the
market, and the individual. It was an extremely gendered view: the British Empire was strong
because it put a premium on bourgeois “manliness,” which is to say manliness defined as
adherence to work and discipline. Berger demonstrates that a middle-class individualism also
manifested as imperialism and nationalism. It was not necessarily friendly to a nanny state,
but did favour a strong state in the sense of one that instilled the values of work and discipline.
These are the roots of many other Canadian ideas, and the roots of them appear to be in
Hobsbawm. [Mookie Kideckel]
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White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the
American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
As It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is a synthetic, sprawling history of the American
West, I want to direct our attention to the chapter most pertinent to the subject of a capitalistic
imperial reach and the week’s readings – Chapter Five: Exploring the Land (pages 119-136).
“Exploring the Land” most clearly connects to the Mitman and Erickson article “Latex and
Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire.” White begins with the expedition of Lewis
and Clark but extends his story to include the efforts of the railroads, the California state
government, and eventually the federal government through the US Geological Survey to map,
catalogue, and examine the West’s geological, botanical, and zoological characteristics. As
with Mitman and Erickson, White presents a narrative reminiscent of Said in that “development
interests determined the problems that were to be solved.” The deployment of new technology
created knowledge about an unknown quantity. This knowledge, in turn, set the parameters for
investment in the West by producing sites of potential profit. [Henk Isom]
Harnetty, Peter. “Cotton Exports and Indian Agriculture, 1861-1870.” The Economic
History Review 24, no. 3, New Series (1971): 414–429.
Harnetty looks at how the dramatic increase in cotton production in India was achieved during
the American Civil War period and how this impacted agrarian political economy. Contrary
to the Marxist account that has generally regarded this period as signifying the extreme
commodification of agriculture under British India, Harnetty provides statistical evidence that
shows that an increase in cotton production did not necessarily come at the cost of domestic
consumption or displacement of food crops. Instead, he finds that an increased demand
for Indian cotton was met by a dramatic increase in the total land under cultivation that
accommodated both cotton as well as food grain production. Moreover, he argues that there
was a significant trickle down effect during this period. This led several cultivators (“Ryots”)
to escape the clutches of moneylenders as they could demand, from middlemen and traders,
higher harvest price for cotton at sowing time (even though harvest price was obviously less
than market price at which traders eventually exported cotton). This view therefore contradicts
the standard classical account, which states that peasants in poor economies are often poor
because they do not respond well to price fluctuations. Harnetty, on the other hand, shows
how the British land revenue policy was the factor that curtailed any sustained prosperity of
the Ryots because taxation (under the Ryotwari system, common in cotton growing areas)
increased substantially, thereby undercutting the prosperity due to increased demand. Harnetty
presents the changing political economy of India’s agrarian economy under British colonial rule
during the American civil war period with a lot of interesting subnational data. [Puneet Bhasin]
Summerhill, William R. Order Against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and
Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003.
Inspired by the "New Economic History," Summerhill studies the introduction of railroads in
late nineteenth-century Brazil. The author argues that savings on transport costs generated
by railroad investments transformed a stagnant export-oriented society into a fast growing
twentieth-century economy. Although Brazilian railroads relied heavily on British foreign
investment, Summerhill contends that government policies on subsidy and regulation enabled
Brazil to capture and retain most of the gains resulting from transport improvements. The
change in infrastructure then stimulated immigration, agricultural growth and the country’s
manufacturing capabilities. The book applies cliometric methods to the Brazilian case and
presents interesting data, but Summerhill’s analysis is far less nuanced than Richard White’s in
Railroaded. [Isadora Mota]
Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge, MA:
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Harvard University Press, 2008.
Andrews utilizes the massacre of striking mine workers by the Colorado state militia on April 20,
1914 in Ludlow, Colorado--later known as the Ludlow Massacre--as the central crisis through
which to examine larger issues of labor, environment, and industrialization in the twentiethcentury United States. Of particular interest to Andrews is illuminating the labor required to
generate the energy required for US industrialization on its “messy periphery.” While Killing
for Coal revolves around a narrative of the ten days of what Andrews calls class warfare
in Southern Colorado following extensive strikes, the book examines deeper questions of
what came to be seen as “American” and why in the twentieth century. To that end, Andrews
juxtaposes the actions and dreams of industrialists, immigrants, miners, and politicians as they
came into contact as a result of the expanding mineral-intensive economy of coal. Coal and,
more specifically, the American dependence on coal function as the central forces driving the
events and trends described here. [Zack Dorner]
Hymer, Stephen. “Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation.” Monthly
Review. September, 1971; Jennifer Morgan. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender
in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004; Silvia
Federici, Caliban and the Witch. New York: Autonomedia, 2004.
A student of MIT economist Charles Kindleberger, Marxist scholar Stephen Hymer was a
much-cited but now-underappreciated thinker in the 1960s and 1970s. For anyone aiming
to fully understand Karl Marx’s use of “primitive accumulation,” or imperialism and capitalism
more generally, this essay is required reading. The role of theft, coercion and violence in
capitalist development is highlighted in a close reading of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, in fact,
was heavily armed, entirely fortified, and ready to use violence on his island. That he exploited
Friday’s labor has been long forgotten. Hymer’s critique of imperialism joined Marx’s own,
especially Capital, Chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.” The secret of American
colonialism and land appropriation also resides in Hymer’s interpretation of this famous novel.
Read this essay alongside Jennifer Morgan’s, Laboring Women and Silvia Federici’s Caliban
and the Witch, both of which underscore the theft of female reproduction in slave regimes; at
the very least, appropriations of land, labor and bodies will reinforce empirical and theoretical
approaches to capitalism writ large. Plus, why not investigate an essay that begins with a
Bertrand Russell quote, “Every living being is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much
as possible of the environment into itself and its seed.” It should also be noted that the Monthly
Review reprinted Hymer’s essay in September 2011 here: http://monthlyreview.org/2011/09/01/
robinson-crusoe-and-the-secret-of-primitive-accumulation. [Bryan Knapp]
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The Corporation
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2011).
Alison Frank, “The Petroleum War of 1910: Standard Oil, Austria, and the Limits of the
Multinational Corporation," American Historical Review 114 (February 2009): 16-41.
Naomi R. Lamoreaux et al., “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of
American Business History,” American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 404-433.
Accounts of American business history have typically begun here, with Alfred Chandler’s Visible
Hand (1977). It certainly couldn’t hurt to become familiar with the Chandlerian opus, and this
David Landes retrospective essay is worthwhile; his death in 2007 occasioned informative
obituaries, tributes, and a special issue of Business History Review 82 (June 2008). Steven
Usselman published “Still Visible” in Technology and Culture 47 (2006). Perhaps Thomas C.
Cochran is the other figure who looms over the field, and his books and articles are numerous.
Graduate students in the 1990s found themselves having to confront books like Martin J. Sklar,
Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988) and David Montgomery’s The Fall of
the House of Labor (1987), both of which confront the political consequences of the corporation
in the late-nineteenth century. Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America (2007), offers a
concise account designed for the undergraduate classroom, and perhaps pairs nicely with such
classics as Alan Trachtenberg’s Incorporation of America (1982), Robert Wiebe’s Search for
Order (1967), and Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism (1963).
The Gilded Age remains fascinating. See Richard John, “Robber Barons Redux: Antimonopoly
Reconsidered,” Enterprise & Society 13 (2012) for the use of editorial cartoons as a source
in business history. The standard for the American elite is Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis
(2001), with some good framing of the larger issues in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling
America (2005). TJ Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (2009) is
a stunningly impressive work of biography. One might also pick up Ron Chernow’s House
of Morgan (2001) and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller (2004); David Nasaw’s Andrew
Carnegie (2004); or Niall Ferguson’s two volume House of Rothschild.
This may also be a good place to consider the technologies of managerial capitalism. Start with
David F. Noble’s America by Design (1977), the essays in Peter Temin, ed. Inside the Business
Enterprise (1991), and then Joanne Yates, Control through Communication (1989). Much of the
foundational literature on the firm has been collected in Geoffrey Jones and Walter Friedman,
eds., The Rise of Modern Firm (2012). On economic forecasting, see Walter Friedman, “The
Harvard Economic Service and the Problems of Forecasting,” History of Political Economy 41
(2009), alongside Adam Tooze’s “Weimar Statistical Economics” article in Economic History
Review 52 (1999). On the relationship of corporations to the idea of public welfare, see Sanford
Jacoby’s Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (1997) and Peter Swanson,
Capitalists against Markets (2002).
Chandler, Alfred D. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.
In Chandler’s foundational work, the “visible hand” of the middle manager supplanted
the “invisible hand” of the market in the period between 1840 and World War I. This revolution
in corporate structure – the birth of the modern multiunit business enterprise – took place
when administrative coordination permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits
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than coordination by market mechanisms alone. A new class of managers, who were for
the first time in history separate from ownership and outside the owners’ families or close
associates, facilitated the process by which independent business units were subsumed within
larger structures. The largest and most powerful corporations (such as oil refining and steel)
succeeded in deploying technological innovations to reach new levels of efficiency in producing
and distributing goods. Chandler’s work has been both celebrated for identifying and explaining
a key organizational development in American business history and criticized for neglecting,
among other things, broader political/social/cultural causes, contexts, and consequences.
Regardless, it remains an important book (if only for its title). [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Harris, Stephen J. “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of
Knowledge.” Configurations 6:2 (1998): 269-304.
This is a pretty great article. In it, Harris proposes the corporation as a means of conceptualizing
global networks. Through the lens of the corporation it is possible to integrate what he defines
as micro (individuals), meso (corporations) and macro (inter-corporate activity) scales into bigpicture narratives that stay faithful to “empirical integrity.” With this framework in place Harris
addresses the relationship between travel and science in the early modern world, specifically
how travel influenced the production of knowledge. The long-distance corporation played a key
role in this process. In order to master communicating at a distance, Harris argues, successful
long-distance corporations incorporated mechanisms of information gathering and knowledge
production into their organization. In fact, individuals generated knowledge about distant
locations and contributed to understanding of the “big sciences” (geography, astronomy, botany)
as they moved around the globe in service of these corporations. Early modern networks relied
on overarching corporate structures to link individuals and institutions across great distances,
which simultaneously facilitated the production and distribution of knowledge. [Zack Dorner]
Coase, Ronald H. “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937): 386–405.
This is the first of two highly influential and widely cited papers published by Ronald Coase.
In this essay, Coase makes the case for the importance of private firms for an efficient market
economy. He does this by pointing to the entrepreneur or business manager who acting within
the hierarchical organizational structure of the firm, allocates resources and labor efficiently.
Coase, however, argues that the allocation mechanism of the firm is very different from the
(efficient) price mechanism of the market. Unlike the market, labor within a firm does not get
allocated due to price fluctuations. Instead, rules and top-down orders allocate resources
efficiently. For this reason, Coase suggested that neoclassical economics must conceptualize
the price mechanism of the market as an efficient coordination device outside the private firm
while conceptualizing the entrepreneur and the structure of the firm as an efficient allocator
inside. He later extended his idea of efficient allocation by firms to the market, by pointing to
inefficient transaction costs that existed in the market—third party costs such as legal fee or
cost such as those for measuring a saleable commodity. By doing this in his second essay, “The
Problem of Social Cost,” Coase critiqued orthodox neoclassical theory, which typically
conceived the price mechanism of the market as operating free of costs. Reducing transaction
costs is the reason why well-formulated institutions—private property rights, rule of law—also
began to be considered important for an efficient market economy. This in turn gave rise to a
new subfield called New Institutional Economics that has had significant influence especially
within development economics. [Puneet Bhasin]
Klein, Jennifer. All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's PublicPrivate Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Klein provides a trenchant analysis of the emergence of the US system of “corporate welfare,”
under which many Americans rely on their employers for health insurance, retirement, and other
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benefits. The emergence of this system was, according to Klein, the result of a compromise
between the government, labor, and large corporations. From the 1930s and well into the
1950s there was substantial popular support for alternative models of government-funded social
welfare, proposed by grassroots organizations and organized labor. The goal of such policies
was to break the link between benefits and employment. Corporations, on the other side,
fought aggressively to quench such initiatives and ensure that workers remained dependent
on employers for benefits. They viewed this as a competition between the Democratic Party
and the labor movement on one side and corporations on the other. Their ultimate goal was to
curtail the growth of the welfare state and undermine the strength of organized labor. It is not
without irony, then, that these deliberate strategies have subsequently wound up undermining
many businesses. In the early years of the twenty first century many big corporations that have
gone bankrupt have cited the “legacy costs” of welfare benefits as an unbearable burden that
put them out of business, conveniently forgetting that these were policies that the corporations
themselves pursued aggressively. [Oddný Helgadottir]
Innis, Harold. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History.
Yale University Press, 1930. Toronto University Press, 1999.
Innis’ book is one of the foundational works of Canadian economic history, and despite some
criticism remains surprisingly enduring. It pioneered the “staples theory” of economic history,
which argued that geographically determined exports determined the ultimate economic
position of countries. For instance, Canada formed as a unified whole because its geography
encouraged an economy based on single staple exports, first the beaver, then timber and
wheat. The South’s dependency on Europe (and later New England) can be explained
because of its reliance on cotton as a staple crop. New England’s economic diversity and
industrialization, on the other hand, led to its economic and political power in relation to the
other two regions. Innis also argues that in the Canadian case the beaver trade laid the
foundations for future corporate organization. Indeed the Hudson’s Bay Company, one of
the world’s first corporations, played a huge role in the trade. More importantly, success in
the fur trade necessitated the construction of massive transportation networks and business
organization to support it. Successful partnerships in North America tended to be British,
partly due to industrialization in Britain that allowed them to trade cheap goods. Innis links this
proficiency in industrial and business efficiency to the entire development of North American
political and economic organization. Even if you find this claim a bit overblown, however,
the identification of the fur trade as the beginning of corporate organization in North America
(including White’s railroads) remains a provocative assessment of the roots of North American
capitalism. [Mookie Kideckel]
Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History,
1900-1916. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967.
Kolko savages sentimental accounts of trust busters or urban reformers of the early twentieth
century. According to Kolko, “the period from approximately 1900 until the United States’
intervention in the war, labeled the ‘progressive’ era by virtually all historians, was really an era
of conservatism.” He asserts that businessmen sought federal protection and rationalization in
an increasingly competitive global environment. But even Kolko seems surprised – or thinks
that readers in 1963 should have been – that the national government would take an active
interest in economic affairs. Kolko posits that American “political capitalism” was structured in
such a way as to master the economy, dominate global competition, and maintain social order
in a “manner that will allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment
permitting reasonable profits over the long run.” American history in the twentieth century
has not deviated from this central fulcrum, no matter the ebbs and flows along the liberalismconservatism dichotomy. When one adds the military industrial complex of highly advanced
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modern societies, “state capitalism” and “political capitalism” make more sense as theories, and
as structures for a better appreciation of recent historiography on conservatism. [Bryan Knapp]
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Consolidation and Crisis
Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes-Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2011).
Julia Ott, “‘The Free and Open People’s Market’: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the
New York Stock Exchange, 1913-1933,” Journal of American History 96 (June 2009): 44-77.
Adam Tooze, “Trouble with Numbers: Statistics, Politics, and History in the Construction of
Weimar’s Trade Balance, 1918-1924,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 678-700.
The obvious place to begin is with the two killer Keynes-Hayek rap videos, the original anthem
and the sequel. In addition to Wapshott’s recent book, there is also the new Backhouse and
Bateman short Keynes biography, Capitalist Revolutionary (2011), and the much longer Hayek’s
Challenge (2004) by Bruce Caldwell. Hayek barely rates mention in Heilbroner’s Worldly
Philosophers, but gets more attention in Muller’s Mind and the Market. Nelson Lichtenstein’s
collection American Capitalism (2006) has an article by Juliet Williams on Hayek and another by
Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand; consult Burns’s longer Goddess of the Market (2009) on Rand.
The Great Depression context of the Keynes-Hayek dispute might guide our attention to
Galbraith’s Great Crash, 1929 (1955, most recently reprinted 2009); Charles Kindleberger,
The World in Depression (1973); Michael Bernstein, The Great Depression (1987); Dietmar
Rothermund, The Global Impact of the Great Depression (1996); or Ben Bernanke’s Essays
on the Great Depression (2004). The Depression also serves as the crucial event for the early
chapters of Mark Blyth’s Great Transformations (2002). New books on crashes include Reinhart
and Rogoff’s This Time is Different (2011) and Scott Reynolds Nelson’s A Nation of Deadbeats
(2012). For the New Deal in the US, see Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The
Political Economy of Public Works (2006); Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and
Politics in America (1994); and Rachel Moran, “Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New
Welfare of the New Deal,” JAH (March 2011).
If there is a robust economic history for WWI and its aftermath, I am not sure what’s beyond
Tooze’s footnotes. More recently, Nicholas Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic
Warfare and the First World War (2010). For the US, see the Hugh Rockoff essay on EH.net.
For a longer account of the century that began with WWI, see Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism:
Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2007). Adam Tooze has also written a massive book
on the Nazi war economy, Wages of Destruction (2007), while Gerald Feldman has an article
version of his book Allianz and the German Insurance Business in Bulletin of the GHI 31 (Fall
2002). Stefan Link has a piece on the Nazi-Ford connection in the Bulletin of the GHI 49 (Fall
2011).
Julia Ott’s article previews her 2011 book, and points the way towards other recent work on
the “democratization” of capitalism, or at least the broader processes by which an increasing
number of Americans became immersed in the language and culture of financial markets:
Bruce Carruthers et al., “Bringing ‘Honest Capital’ to Poor Borrowers: The Passage of the US
Uniform Small Loan Law, 1907-1930,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42 (winter 2012);
Peter Knight, “Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification, and the Financial Column of
Town Topics Magazine,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012); Sung Won Kang and Hugh
Rockoff, “Capitalizing Patriotism: The Liberty Loans of WWI,” NBER Working Paper (2006)
The money debates of the late-nineteenth century mark another important site of “capitalist
learning.” See Michael O’Malley, “Free Silver and the Constitution of Man,” Common-place 6
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(2006); Bruce G. Carruthers and Sarah Babb, “The Color of Money and the Nature of Value:
Greenbacks and Gold in Postbellum America,” American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996). For
the regulatory history of financial capitalism, see Thomas McCraw, Prophets of Regulation:
Charles Francis Adams; Louis D. Brandeis; James M. Landis; Alfred E. Kahn (1986); Jonathan
Levy, “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the
United States, 1875-1905,” AHR 111 (2006).
You can’t go wrong consulting Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman’s Cambridge Economic
History of the United States (2000). The twentieth-century volume has a Great Depression
essay by Peter Temin, a finance essay by Barry Eichengreen, a labor economics essay by
Claudia Goldin, and many more.
Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
A compilation of Peter Temin's Lionel Robbins lectures, the book presents how the Great
Depression was caused due to a large shock—World War I—to major western economies.
Unlike most other accounts that attribute the cause to the stock market crash of 1929, Temin
traces a longer causal history. Although the Great Depression started in 1929, Temin argues
that World War I created such dramatic shifts in the world's political and economic climate
that it made the resumption of the gold standard even more unviable than before. Taking a
constructivist position, Temin, however, shows how the dominance of a gold standard ideology
constrained policy solutions for the "spoils of war," thereby, bringing back the gold standard in
the post-war period. Given that currency devaluation was technically impossible under the gold
standard, the post-war period witnessed multiple deflationary shocks that propagated across
nations, culminating finally in the Great Depression. Temin sees the obstinate adherence to
the gold standard and ideas of "sound money" as not only causing the Great Depression but
also prolonging it. He argues that it was only when the gold standard was abandoned and the
New Deal and other expansionary policies adopted that recovery finally began, even though
at a very slow pace. This highly accessible historical account of the Great Depression—cause,
propagation, prolongation, and recovery—is useful for anyone interested in macroeconomics
and early twentieth century history. [Puneet Bhasin]
Rossi, Nicola, and Gianni Toniolo. "Catching up or Falling Behind? Italy's Economic
Growth, 1895-1947." The Economic History Review 45.3 (1992): 537-63.
Italy’s experience of the Great Depression was not under a capitalist economy but rather a
corporatist one organized by the Fascist regime, which restricted laissez-faire and imports in
an attempt to establish an Italian autarky. In this article which seeks to address the question
of Italy’s periodic economic weaknesses in the 20th century, Rossi and Toniolo indicate that
it was the Fascist period, not unification or anything else, that sowed the seeds of Italy’s
later economic troubles (e.g. the traumas of postwar industrialization in the north). The root
of these problems, they argue, was the often chronic undercapitalization of Italian industries
which became apparent soon after unification but which might have been resolved without
the restrictions on capital imports imposed by Mussolini and the Fascists. This article is an
illuminating one both for anyone interested in Italy’s experience(s) of capitalism and for those
interested in the economic policies of (capital ‘F’) Fascism. [John Delea]
Nerozzi, Sebastiano. “From the Great Depression to Bretton Woods: Jacob Viner and
international monetary stabilization (1930–1945).” European Journal of the History of
Economic Thought 18.1 (February 2011): 55-84.
Like Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes-Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics,
Nerozzi’s article is an intellectual history with a narrow focus. However, unlike Wapshott’s
book, Nerozzi substantially grounds the ideas and economic analysis of Jacob Viner in the
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political events of the day, thus providing a more satisfying account of the economic debates
that sprung from the Great Depression. The article’s subject, Viner, was a Canadian, Harvardtrained economist with close ties to the Roosevelt administration. Nerozzi analyzes Viner’s
response to and influence on the significant economic events of the period he covers – the
Great Depression, Roosevelt’s economic programs of the mid-thirties, and the Bretton Woods
conference. Like Viner, Nerozzi focuses on the importance of gold, noting that Viner opposed
Roosevelt’s Gold Purchase Program and derided the British Plan at Bretton Woods because
it deemphasized gold. Most significantly, Nerozzi presents Viner as an essential figure to
the economic developments of the time. Viner served as a reluctant agent for the Roosevelt
administration in Europe during the 1930s to gauge reaction to the president’s policies, and was
the leader of the Economic and Financial Group, which advised the State Department. The
Canadian also worked on the initial drafts for what would become the international monetary
systems established at Bretton Woods, and carried out a heated correspondence with John
Maynard Keynes debating the British and American Plans presented there. [Henk Isom]
Shiroyama, Tomoko. China During the Great Depression: Market, State and the World
Economy, 1929-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. 2008.
Under the influence of Milton Friedman, the Great Depression’s impact on China has long been
underestimated. Scholars of economic history general follow Friedman’s theory and argue
that the Chinese economy performed relatively well during the depression years because of
its silver standard of currency. Shiroyama explores beyond the indicators of general economic
performance, like the GDP, and points out the depression’s immediate impact on specific
sectors in the Chinese economy. Although she eventually return to a general assessment
of the Chinese fiscal and financial policy and not move on to the unequal distribution of the
depression’s impact, the materials she brings to us are already useful to a new understanding of
the early twentieth century Chinese economy. [Chu Shiu On]
Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Colin Gordon’s New Deals also adds to studies of the liberal-conservative dilemma more
broadly, and is a remarkable contribution to New Deal historiography. His research queries
both liberal and radical understandings of the New Deal by repositioning business agitation
and interest at the center of the account. But it is not a simple conversation. Gordon maps the
extreme difficulties in studying and making generalizations about business involvement in the
New Deal. He hopes to “move the debate beyond simple questions of whether the New Deal
was liberal or conservative, or of whether the New Deal can be called in as evidence of a certain
kind of ‘state.’” He accomplishes this revision by boldly claiming that any aspect of the New
Deal, from private corporate welfare in the 1920s, to “the regulatory innovations of 1929-1933,
and the labor and welfare law of 1935,” were driven by conservative corporate interests. Even
the “progressive turn of the ‘second New Deal,’” -- which yielded the Wagner Act, reaffirmed
labor’s participation in industrial processes, and created the Social Security Act and the Fair
Labor Standards Act -- resulted from “two decades of business strategy and two years of
business-driven recovery politics.” But “business” is not a unified bloc in Gordon’s account, and
the dialectic between labor and corporate interests is central to his thesis. Gordon proposes
a “disorganizational synthesis,” basically a history that captures the variegated, motive,
complex dynamics between economic self-interest, corporate and political competition, shifting
relationships between business and government. The disorganizational synthesis includes the
diffusion of power and politics in a federal system – something he calls “competitive federalism,”
all contained with “democratic capitalism.” Competitive federalism and varying (and competitive)
state tax regimes encouraged businesses to relocate in the perpetual search for the cheapest
land and labor. [Bryan Knapp]
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The Liberal Global Order
Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and their Borrowers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2007).
Michael A. Bernstein, “Economic Knowledge, Professional Authority, and the State: The Case
of American Economics during and after World War II,” in Robert F. Garnett Jr., ed., What Do
Economists Know? New Economics of Knowledge, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 104-123.
Barry Eichengreen, “The Bretton Woods System,” in Globalizing Capital: A History of the
International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 91-133.
My goal this week was to explore the political economy of twentieth-century global development.
From the US History standpoint, Elizabeth Borgwardt’s A New Deal for the World (2005) has
a Bretton Woods chapter, and there is no lack of recent work on modernization theory as an
engine of foreign policy: David Engerman, ed., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development,
and the Global Cold War (2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory
in Cold War America (2007); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization
and the Construction of an American World Order (2010); Michael Latham, Modernization
as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (2000) and
The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and US Foreign Policy from the
Cold War to the Present (2011); and Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns (2008) on USIndonesian relations. See also Howard Brick’s Transcending Capitalism (2006) for the vision of
a postcapitalist future in mid-century American social thought.
Economic Geography has something to contribute to this discussion, perhaps starting with Neil
Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (1984), anything by
David Harvey, and recently synthesized in the Mackinnon and Cumbers volume, Introduction to
Economic Geography: Globalization, Uneven Development, and Place (2007). You might find
it worthwhile to scan the table of contents of the Journal of Economic Geography or Antipode:
A Radical Journal of Geography. The politics of food and development figure here, as in Ines
Prodöhl, “‘A Miracle Bean’: How Soy Conquered the West, 1909-1950,” Bulletin of the GHI 46
(Spring 2010).
Key works in economics and political science include Fred Block, The Origins of International
Economic Disorder (1978); Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance
(1996); Louis Pauly, Who Elected the Bankers? (1998); Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the
Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002); Jacqueline Best, Limits of
Transparency (2005); Leonard Seabrooke, The Social Sources of Financial Power (2006).
See the other titles published the “Cornell Studies in Money series” (in which Ngaire Woods
appears). Gareth Austin seems to be doing the key work on Africa: “The Developmental State
and Labour-intensive Industrialization: ‘Late Development’ Re-considered,” Economic History
of the Developing Regions 25 (2010), but see also Robert H. Bates for the political economy of
development in Africa (and the coffee trade in particular). David Ludden offers a starting point
for South Asia. See also Patrick Heller, Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation
of Capitalism in Kerala, India (1999). Look also for Sanjay Reddy and Thomas Pogge’s “How
Not to Count the Poor” paper on World Bank statistics. One might also engage the debate
between William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs on foreign aid and development.
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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Why, after years of isolationism and the humiliation of an internationalist president after the
First World War, did the United States decide to invest so much into creating a system of
international regimes after World War II? This is the primary question that Elizabeth Borgwardt
addresses, and her answer points to the importance of the New Deal. Multilateralism after
the Second World War, in this view, stemmed out of Roosevelt administration desires
to “internationalize” the New Deal. It was, moreover, acceptable to Americans because the
New Deal had taught them that preserving self-interest was bound up in preserving the whole
community. Borgwardt expounds this thesis by exploring the three regimes she views as must
vital to the construction of a post-War international community: Bretton Woods monetary policy;
the United Nations and its associated charters; and the general body of legislation forged in the
Nuremberg trials. Borgwardt’s primary intervention here is to add to the list of key aspirational
documents the 1941 Atlantic Charter, claiming that it was the starting point for modern human
rights discourse. Though innovative in its tone, Borgwardt argues that the Atlantic Charter
was essentially an expansion of the New Deal to an international scale. The organizations
she highlights became politicized and, in Borgwardt’s view, the US engagement in the cold
war squandered the “heady multilateralist zeitgeist of 1945.” Borgwardt concludes by urging a
return to that zeitgeist, which would benefit US interests and the entire world. [Mookie Kideckel]
Chibber, Vivek. Locked in Place: State-building and Late Industrialization in India.
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Why did few developmental states succeed at industrialization post World War II while most
others failed miserably? Political sociologists have generally answered this comparative
question by highlighting the importance of Weberian style “rational bureaucracies”—
autonomous, meritocratic, professional—in disciplining capital and directing it towards
industrialization of select key sectors of the economy. In researching the dismal performance
of the Indian developmental state with the immensely successful South Korean state, Chibber
instead explores why Korean capitalists were open to the state meddling in their affairs
(disciplining) while Indian capital was not. What he finds is that in either case, capitalists
acted “rationally,” in their self-interest, but responded to diametrically opposite incentives. The
incentive for South Korean capitalists was the windfall opportunity presented by Japanese
capital’s desire to move out of labor-intensive sectors in the US export market so as to
move into hi-tech sectors. Given that export operations to foreign markets are inherently
risky—no trust networks—South Korean capital was willing to be disciplined into Export Led
Industrialization (ELI) in return for the state’s support for securing Japanese knowledge and
capital transfers. Indian capital on the other hand had no incentive to promote industrialization
or accept state disciplining. India’s Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model guaranteed a
large domestic market for a small group of capitalists, protected from domestic competition due
to the license raj and from any international competition due to high trade barriers. The result
was very low incentive for industrialization compared to South Korea. [Puneet Bhasin]
Bardhan, Pranab K. Scarcity, Conflicts, and Cooperation: Essays in the Political and
Institutional Economics of Development. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
In light of the highly path dependent arguments presented by economists such as Acemoglu
and Johnson as well as Engerman and Sokoloff, Pranab Bardhan observes that development
economics is often narrowly concerned with establishing a link between the historical existence
of specific institutions such as private property rights and the level of industrialization. He
warns that relying solely on the historicity of such formal institutions can deflect attention away
from indigenous institutions that may have instead evolved to be the real impediments for
industrialization and growth. To prove his point, Bardhan argues that several well functioning
mercantile economies could not industrialize because there simply were no financial markets
capable of coordinating capital needed for large-scale enterprises. While indigenous financial
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institutions embedded in social hierarchies and networks served a mercantile economy well,
these very institutions were insufficient when it came to industrialization. In contrast to this,
Bardhan points to the East Asian development experience of the 20th century where states
stepped in directly to develop specific industries by coordinating capital while also deploying
a carrot and stick strategy for private interests. However, in their narrow focus on specific
institutions like private property rights, many economists have often overlooked the direct role
states play in the developing world. Toward a broader analysis of development then, Bardhan
calls for analyzing institutions and institutional change within a context of three, broad and often
opposing, coordination mechanisms - the state, the market, and community organizations.
Additionally, Bardhan provides multiple arguments for resource scarcity and conflict in the
developing world, such as severe collective action problems that exist due to highly unequal
mobilization and bargaining capabilities of different social groups. [Puneet Bhasin]
Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the
New Imperialism. New York: Holt, 2006.
Grandin is not bashful about emphasizing the negative impact American imperialism has had
on Latin America throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Latin America, according
to Grandin, acted as a laboratory for American Empire where US policy-makers honed the
three key tenets of today’s imperialism: “punitive idealism,” “free-market absolutism,” and “rightwing Christian mobilization.” Throughout the often polemical narrative Grandin highlights the
role of US investment capital in influencing state policy and the close ties between US military
intervention and corporate interests. Of particular importance to the history of capitalism is
Grandin’s discussion of the free market experiments in Central and South America during the
1970s and 1980s--including Pinochet’s regime in Chile--that illuminates the intertwined histories
of twentieth-century imperialism and capitalism in Latin America. Under the auspices of the
IMF, multinational banks, and the US Treasury “free-market absolutism” continues today as an
important facet of the United States’ “new imperialism.” [Zack Dorner]
Almeida, Paul, and Erica Walker. "The Pace of Neoliberal Globalization: A Comparison of
Three Popular Movement Campaigns in Central America." Social Justice 33.3 (2006): 17590.
Walker and Almeida’s article takes a look at three modes of protest to the imposition of
neoliberal legislation and austerity measures in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In
the ‘90s and early ‘00s these countries experienced some of the largest protest movements in
their history in response to service cuts and tax hikes intended to help pay off international debt
or meet World Bank/IMF loan conditions. Their analysis concludes that popular movements to
slow down or repeal neoliberal reforms in Central America are most likely to be successful with
the support of one or more strong opposition parties, e.g. the Nicaraguan case in which the
Sandinista minority in government proved critical to blocking a major cut in public school funding
by the Arnoldo Aleman government.[John Delea]
Milanovic, Branko. "Globalization and Goals: Does Soccer Show the Way?" Review of
International Political Economy 12.5 (2005): 829-50.
Milanovic draws a clever comparison between global labor markets/capital and association
football, arguing that the commercialization of the latter in the last twenty years serves as an
analogy for the distributive processes of globalization. Utilizing historical data from Premier
League, Serie A and FIFA World Cup championships, Milanovic argues that increased labor
mobility among soccer players has resulted in the concentration of talent among a few elite
clubs (e.g. FC Barcelona, Manchester United) to the detriment of parity both between and within
national leagues. Milanovic bridges the gap between soccer and political economy by drawing
links to analogous processes of labor movement and income distribution in the global economy,
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closing with some suggestions to restore equity both to weakened national economies and
weakened local clubs. [John Delea]
Green, Duncan. Silent Revolution: The Rise And Crisis Of Market Economics In Latin
America. London: Monthly Review Press, 2003, 2nd ed.
Silent Revolution aims at stimulating thinking on why neoliberalism has produced such modest
gains in Latin America. The second edition of this book was written in the context of the
financial breakdowns in Mexico (1995), Brazil (1998) and Argentina (2002). Green explores
in detail the creation of market-driven neoliberal economies in the context of the 1980s debt
crisis and examines how the so-called “silent revolution” of neoliberalism in the 1990s has
failed to produce an economic miracle in this part of the developing world. Green assesses the
structural adjustments imposed by the IMF/World Bank in Latin America and concludes that
these institutions could never have lived up to their own claims. His study of the harmful effects
of neoliberal reforms on gender relations, crime, families, workers and the environment in Latin
America are particularly illuminating. Chapter 3, “Poverty Brokers: The International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank” seems especially pertinent to our class discussions this week. [Isadora
Mota]
Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers. 2004.
The liberal global economic order has long been criticized in academic discourse, but few of
the criticisms deal with the intentions behind the globalizers like American experts works in
the IMF and the World Bank. Scholars like Ngaire Woods depict the economic experts trained
in American universities as theorists who do not possess enough local knowledge of their
overseas clients. This image implies that the detrimental effects on South American and Asian
economies brought by foreign (mainly American) interventions are due to ignorance rather
than imperialistic conspiracies. John Perkins provides a completely different account: some
American experts—he claims that he had been one of them—are in fact “economic hitmen”
send to disrupt the local economies and provide the pretext of further foreign interventions.
The evidences for this argument may not be convincing to academic readers, but John Perkins
effective challenges academic understanding of global financial institutions. When scholars
demean such arguments as mere “conspiracy theories”, are they in fact setting a ungrounded
restriction on academic discourses? [Chu Shiu On]
Borgwardt, Elizabeth. “Bernath Lecture: Commerce and Complicity: Corporate
Responsibility for Human Rights Abuses as a Legacy of Nuremberg.” Diplomatic History
34 (September 2010): 627-640.
While denaturalizing capitalism, historians have noted the inextricable links between state and
corporate power. Following her first book, Borgwardt’s recent work explores the “other trial”
at Nuremberg, namely the attempt to bring large German companies like Krupp to heal for
manufacturing bombs and chemicals employed in gas chambers. Her next book will illuminate
the difficulties involved in corporate responsibility, complicity, and accountability, especially
in an international legal context – her specialty. For a contribution to an understanding of the
postwar era, and American legal, corporate, and military power in the world (through a lens
of international law and human rights), Borgwardt’s, A New Deal for the World: America’s
Vision for Human Rights of course was essential. Now her research in the legal structures and
arguments in Nuremberg against large corporations rests at the center of new and exciting work
on the role of corporations in our daily lives. Borgwardt’s legal and historical investigations
centered highlight Nuremberg’s implications for human rights understanding in the global
realm. For her, Nuremberg’s impact on today’s corporate accountability movements are equally
profound, as are her investigations in the postwar global financial structures. [Bryan Knapp]
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Sklar, Richard. Corporate Power in an African State: the Political Impact of Multinational
Mining Companies in Zambia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
In this text Sklar presented the specific case study that informed his important postimperialism
theory and perspective on a rising global bourgeoisie. After World War II and during the
independence era, new states were born that needed to choose their political economic routes
through interrelated spaces. These negotiations, of course, took place during the Cold War
and the exponential rise of multinational corporations. But while bungling along trying to
do something according to material, cultural, and ideological influences within the very real
pressures of land use, weather patterns, drought, and uneven capitalist development, Africans
ended in creating the postimperialist frame that Sklar derived from his researches in the
Zambian copper belt. This postimperialism framework detailed global transnational capitalist
and laboring classes within which Africa-as-continent existed. Multinational mining companies
in Zambia created new relations with the state, and with labor unions, and ultimately helped
form a new managerial bourgeoisie. His vital and necessary article “Postimperialism: A Class
Analysis of Corporate Expansion,” inspired by Sklar’s empirical work on multinational mining
companies, detailed the scholarly formulation of multinational corporations as instruments of the
transnational corporate bourgeoisie, and other state bureaucratic actors in the transition to “high
modernism.” For Sklar, mixed economies and new technologies and expert civil servants
followed on the heels of colonial capitalism and influenced the formation of modern capitalism
and globalization.[Bryan Knapp]
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Deindustrialization and Consumer Society
Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Columbia, and the Making of a Global
Working Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
Simon Partner, “Nimble Fingers: The Story of the Transistor Radio,” in Assembled in Japan:
Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), 193-224.
Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community
Marketplaces in Postwar America,” American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1050-1081.
The primary goal is to recognize transnational labor history as a crucial component of the
history of capitalism. Michael Hanagan’s “An Agenda for Transnational Labor History,”
International Review of Social History 49 (2004) offers a starting point, alongside Marcel van
der Linden’s “Transnationalizing American Labor History,” Journal of American History 86
(1999) and subsequent Workers of the World (2008). The journal Labor: Studies in the WorkingClass History of the Americas is essential (as is its parent organization, LAWCHA). Jefferson
Cowie’s Capital Moves (1999) follows jobs out of the US, while Cindy Hahamovitch’s No Man’s
Land (2011) and Deborah Cohen’s Braceros (2011) track workers into the US. See also Kornel
Chang, “Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of AntiAsian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880-1910,” Journal of American History
96 (December 2009); and Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas, eds., Intimate Labors (2010) for
the global workforce in caregiving. Leon Fink’s Sweatshops at Sea (2011) captures the global
maritime workforce, as do the amazing photographs in Allan Sekula’s Fish Stories (1995) and
Performance under Working Conditions (2003).
Walmart has offered scholars the chance to think about post-industrial labor, global supply
chains, and consumerism. See Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart (2009); Nelson
Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution (2009); and Shane Hamilton’s Trucking Country (2008). The
scholarship on consumer capitalism has gone in many directions since the pathbreaking work of
Lizbeth Cohen, William Leach, and others. Perhaps the most surprising entry into the discussion
recently has been James Livingston’s Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the
Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (2011). Sandy Zipp recommends this exchange on
the US Intellectual History blog: review and response, as well as this earlier Livingston piece.
Robert Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (2002) has many
followers. See also Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century (2002) and Bernhard Rieger, “From
People’s Car to New Beetle: The Transatlantic Journeys of the Volkswagen Beetle,” Journal
of American History 97(June 2010). For global consumer culture, see Peter N. Stearns,
Consumerism in World History (2001); and Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, eds.,
Decoding Modern Consumer Societies (2012). Setha Low and Neil Smith’s volume The Politics
of Public Space (2006) has articles by David Harvey, Dolores Hayden, and Elizabeth Blackmar
(among others) that explore corporate appropriation and privatization of space.
Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and
Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
For Timothy Burke there was “preaching the gospel of consumption” and expert marketing,
power-from-above but still African, high-modernist attempt to “create new African subjectivities”
in order to sell products such as soap and toothpaste. Burke detailed the rise of marketing
and consumer integration in the postwar period. He investigated sources and people from
top to bottom along the producer-consumer chain in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The shift
from colony to neocolonial relationships revealed multiple power relationships and how these
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change over time., But also the era highlighted how local Africans utilized new social, political
and economic relationships within a moment of global commodification. Missionaries in the
nineteenth century possessed certain visions of their civilizing mission, from cleanliness,
personal behavior, family life, and religious beliefs, and Burke showed how the consumer
revolution and new market cultures expressed similar pressures on local populations.
African capitalists also saw social order and prosperity arising from their specific actions in
the world. Africa very much was an integral piece of the postwar capitalist puzzle. Burke
quoted marketers, managers and executives who believed that capitalist political economy
would “create a better state of mind amongst backward people.” The capitalist in Africa
mirrored those of other regions, nations and continents. Business civilization reached extreme
suffusion in the postwar era, and, as Burke noted, “like the missionaries of a century ago, these
professionals discovered in their appointed task a ‘civilizing mission’” that functioned to maintain
specific power relations during transitions from the colonial to the postcolonial periods. [Bryan
Knapp]
Jacobs, Meg. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Central to Jacobs’s work is the notion of “economic citizenship” - the ability to buy goods and
to achieve a certain standard of living. In a study that extends from the 1900s to 1960, Jacobs
tracks the growing power and eventual dissolution of a coalition of groups – largely formed
by labor unions and middle class consumers – who furthered their interests by advocating
increased purchasing power for the American people. Jacobs examines the economic and
political issues that occurred during her period of study in terms of how they affected people’s
capacity to consume, and how the popular pursuit of consumption affected economic and
political policy. Jacobs shifts the focus of the conversation surrounding the Great Depression
and New Deal era to the way consumers, and particularly women, talked about the economy.
Framing economic crises in terms of reduced purchasing power was so prevalent that the AFL
adopted the rhetoric in 1925. This shared belief about the efficacy of economic policy and
economic justice – that all Americans were entitled to a certain lifestyle and that good economic
policy expanded Americans’ ability to consume – presaged the union of female, middle class
consumers and organized labor in the New Deal coalition. This coalition, and its purchasing
power rhetoric, remained strong through World War II, but its dissolution after the war led to the
end of a consumption agenda by 1960. [Henk Isom]
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of A Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Jacobson is explicit in designating Whiteness of a Different Color a work of cultural American
history. He reveals the historical construction of race through novels, movies, newspapers, and
magazines while acknowledging that philosophy, politics and science served as the basis for
those racial depictions. The broad arc of the book begins in the Early Republic, where slavery,
expansion into a Native American-dominated frontier, and the 1790 Naturalization Act (which
gave citizenship to all “free white persons”) established an inclusive, privileged whiteness for
peoples of European descent in the United States. As European immigration increased in the
19th century, whiteness fractured and different racial categories were created for people of
different Continental origin. The final section hinges on the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which
established immigration quotas along the existing European racial divisions. Conversely,
because this legislation alleviated fears associated with immigrants, whiteness once again
consolidated around skin color and the culture reestablished broader racial categories. As
Jacobson alludes to and Aviva Chomsky demonstrates forcefully in Linked Labor Histories, this
racial reconfiguration would have a huge impact on union inclusion and organized labor efforts
in the United States throughout the 20th century. [Henk Isom]
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Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and
Collective Action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Micheletti conceives of political consumerism as a novel, post-modern, form of “citizen
responsibility-taking.” It blends private and public spheres, mirrors the “virtues” of traditional
citizen engagement, and is an outlet for what she terms “individualized collective action.”
Micheletti argues that since the 1980s, political consumerism has taken new forms, and her
book begins with attempts to understand this through theoretical frameworks. She argues that
a globally oriented, post-modern, political consumerism has risen concomitantly with the public’s
disengagement from traditional voluntary organizations and state apparatuses. Citizens are
no longer joiners in the same degree they once were, and governments increasingly deal with
issues that extend beyond their borders. Thus, Micheletti suggests that consumer activism
in the 21st century is, at least in part, a response to transforming definitions of citizenship
and government. Micheletti supplements her theory with history. She argues that the United
States has a particular affinity for political boycotts, something she traces to bouts over tea
prices before the country’s revolution, and suggests that, “scholars of history know intuitively
that issues of consumption…lie behind all revolutions” (36). Micheletti’s brief history of political
consumerism covers various campaigns from the 19th century until the book’s writing in 2002.
Reaching the present, Micheletti gives examples of modern consumerism around the world and
provides a detailed case study of an eco-labelling campaign conducted by the Swedish Society
for Nature Conservation (SSNP). She ends with a sanguine analysis of political consumerism’s
importance as a current and future tool of citizen engagement. Ultimately, the book’s value is
in applying citizenship theory to questions of political consumerism. It is a useful supplement
to more traditional histories of consumerism, like Cohen’s Consumer’s Republic and Lawrence
Glickman’s Buying Power (Chicago, 2009). [Mookie Kideckel]
Lan, Pei-chia. Global Cinderella: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in
Taiwan. Durham: Duke University Press. 2006.
Southeast Asian migrant domestics played significant but ignored roles in the modernist
developments in Asia. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia, like
Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, have recruited foreign household workers— many of them
come from the Philippines and Indonesia –at a rapidly increasing rate. Lan’s field research
reveals the sufferings of these migrant workers as “others” in terms of classes, nationalities,
ethnicities, and education levels. Her findings also point to an ironic, but intellectually
interesting, relationship. As Chinese employers the new rich countries tends to discriminate and
exploit the Southeast Asian workers, they forget the coming of these workers is in fact a part of
a system which exploits themselves—only with the migrant workers’ labor the extremely long
work hours in these new rich countries become possible. The ignorance of these employers—
of both the sufferings of the others and themselves—actually contributes to the weak working
class consciousness in East Asian modernization. [Chu Shiu On]
Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009.
Critical anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff tackle neoliberalism and the incorporation
of ethnicity in this engaging long essay. The cover of the book shows a smiling Zulu woman
with the slogan “The Zulu Kingdom Awaits You” – a marketing attempt at attracting tourists,
creating a brand, and providing a cultural commodity for sale on the global market. This book
presents provocative ideas about the co-optation of multiple identities by global capitalism and
by multinational corporations. Additionally, the Comaroffs demonstrate how ethnic groups
such as the San “Bushmen” incorporate themselves and organize much like corporations.
Cultural identity and specificity are for sale. In the case of the San, they attempt to patent local
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plants with the hopes of sales in the millions. The authors compel us to think about multiethnic
identities in a totalizing global system, from Scotland the brand to “casino capitalism,” whereby
Native American casinos, land grabs, and political struggles provide new spaces for private
sphere activities and money-making. According to the Comaroffs, markets are everywhere and
everything is for sale. This book works exceptionally well with David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism and Neil Smith’s The Endgame of Globalization. [Bryan Knapp]
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Finance and Shareholder Value
Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
Rakesh Kharuna, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American
Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 333-383.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2011), 361-391.
Managed by the Markets is one of several recent books dealing with the power of finance
to transform economic life and culture. Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political
Origins of the Rise of Finance (2011) has generated a lot of interest, especially in the wake of
her “Financialization of the American Economy,” Socio-Economic Review 3 (2005). So too has
Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the US Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (2010).
Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (2009) and Richard Sennett,
Culture of the New Capitalism (2007) might also prove useful. See also Ernie Englander and
Allen Kaufman, “The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to
Corporate Social Indifference,” Enterprise & Society 5 (2004).
Graeber’s Debt could pair nicely with Louis Hyman’s Debtor Nation (2011) and Borrow:
The American Way of Debt (2012), but clearly Graeber is pursuing a set of philosophical
considerations that put him in conversation with Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy (2012)
[excerpted here in The Atlantic] and Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale
(2010). This might also be a good moment to mention Viviana Zelizer’s two excellent books,
The Social Meaning of Money (1994) and The Purchase of Intimacy (2005), both of which deal
with the bleeding of “the economic” into presumptively “non-economic” aspects of the human
experience. See also Mary Poovey, “For Everything Else, There’s...” Social Research 68 (2001).
Kara Swanson previews her dissertation on milk banks, blood banks, and sperm banks in
Enterprise & Society 12 (2011).
An outpouring of scholarship has sought to diagnose the recent economic crisis, and there
are numerous worthwhile journalistic (e.g. the Wired “Recipe for Disaster” article) and
documentary accounts (e.g. Inside Job or the current Frontline series “Money, Power, and
Wall Street”). But for “how did we get here?” questions, one might start with Joseph Stiglitz,
Globalization and its Discontents (2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005);
and Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (2011) [conveniently animated here]. From there, Gerald
Friedman, “Economists and the Crisis: A Guide to the Perplexed,” Labor History 51 (2010).
Government and Markets: Toward an New Theory of Regulation (2010), edited by Edward
Balleisen and David Moss, offers a number of historically-informed policy prescriptions.
If you want to antagonize your friends who are management consultants (now that you can
abuse your friends who already have MBAs), see Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest
Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (2006). The technologies of
business deserve analysis, and there is a robust scholarship in such journals as Accounting
History. See also Martin Campbell-Kelly, “The Rise and Rise of the Spreadsheet,” in his edited
volume The History of Mathematical Tables (2003); Alex Preda, “Socio-Technical Agency in
Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker,” Social Studies of Science 36 (2006). See
Marc Levinson’s The Box (2006) for a history of globalization through the shipping container.
For a similar sense of things in movement, see Pietra Rivoli, Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global
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Economy (2009).
This might be a good place to reconsider intellectual property (last discussed during the
Industrial Revolution week). See Alex Cummings, “From Monopoly to Intellectual Property:
Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, 1909-1971,” Journal of American
History 97 (December 2010); or David Suisman, Selling Sounds (2009). Also consider business
histories of new industries, as in Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
(2011).
Jensen, Michael C. and William H. Meckling. “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior,
Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” Journal of Financial Economics 3 (October
1976): 305-360.
Some scholars (e.g. Marion Fourcade and John Quiggin) studying firms and corporations
believe that Jensen and Meckling’s article influenced the way in which corporations are
operated today profoundly, contributing to a practice in which short-term profits are seen as
more important than long-term gains and overall stability. With 31,140 citations (on March 18,
2012) on google scholar it does not seem unreasonable to assume that the article has had an
important impact. In their article Jensen and Meckling suggest that the use of stock options
as compensation for CEOs could be a useful managerial tool, as it would incentivize CEOs
to maximize shareholder value. This practice has since become widespread. Many see it as
one of the key problems with how publicly traded corporations are operated today, with shortterm gains trumping all other concerns and many instances of executives manipulating their
companies’ stock. [Oddný Helgadóttir]
Porter, Michael E. and Mark. R. Kramer. “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent
Capitalism – and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth.” Harvard Business Review,
Jan-Feb 2011.
Porter and Kramer argue that businesses are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the pursuit
of short terms profits for shareholders leads to social and environmental depredations and
backlash against business in the form of stifling regulations. To overcome this cycle and
create a sustainable and equitable capitalism, businesses need to reinvent their strategies
to create “shared value,” which would connect economic progress with social progress. By
recognizing that social needs, not just economic ones, define markets, firms will minimize the
social harms that end up creating internal costs. Porter and Kramer see this strategy as a broader
conception of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Individuals still act in self-interest (and are better
suited to do so than the government), but they do so in ways that create both social and
economic gain for the greatest number of people. Whether a new kind of corporate self-interest
can actually lead to greater social good is, of course, up for debate . [Lindsay Schakenbach]
Miller, James Andrew and Tom Shales. Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of
ESPN. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2011.
Shales and Miller conducted over five hundred interviews with people affiliated with ESPN
in some capacity and compiled those efforts into a sprawling and thorough oral history of
the company. Intended for a popular audience, much of the book deals with the clashes
of big personalities and much publicized scandals that have repeatedly put the company in
the headlines and gossip pages since its founding. However, Shales and Miller deserve a
great deal of credit for balancing these sultry stories with the realities of ESPN’s corporate
development. The book begins with the somewhat tragic story of the Rasmussen family, who
had the idea for the network in 1979 but who were deemed to lack the television experience and
managerial skill to effectively run the company. This serves as a unifying theme throughout the
book: certain CEOs or managers are chosen to fit ESPN’s needs at particular times, be they
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creative development, corporate expansion, or budgetary responsibility. In conjunction with
these stories of individual leadership, Those Guys Have All the Fun also discusses the mergers
and takeovers that dot ESPN’s history, from Getty Oil’s initial investment in the company to
Disney’s purchase of network through ABC in 1996. Most interestingly, Shales and Miller
have collected testimony about the contingencies and motivations surrounding these corporate
maneuverings from the very people involved. The book therefore offers an excellent window
into the corporate culture and the corresponding motivations behind financial decisions during
the eighties, nineties, and ‘aughts, albeit one that should be taken with a grain of salt. [Henk
Isom]
Tsai, Kellee S. Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. 2004.
How is private business possible in a communist state? Kellee Tsai’s research points toward the
informal but pervasive financial markets which evade the communist state’s suppression. Even
after the economic reform began in the late 1970s, credit creation was still legally confined to
the state banks which served only state-owned—or owned by the cronies of the party officials—
enterprises. In defiance of the national banking laws, small business owners have created a
dizzying variety of informal financing mechanisms, including rotating credit associations and
private banks disguised as other types of organizations. Tsai’s study not only reveals the
struggles of the small business owners under the communist regime, but also suggests an
alternative understanding of the Chinese financial market—we should not only look at those
modern (western) banks started in the early twentieth century, but also at the long tradition of
private financing devices. [Chu Shiu On]
Philips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the
New Deal to Reagan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Philips-Fein displays a deep analysis of the business-activist networks which helped define,
and reflected, the conservative era of postwar capitalism. Her archival research unearths
relationships between conservative men – their letters, publications, and writings – and traces
the fundraising trail between individuals, corporations, and think tanks. These resources led to
the creation of university centers like Stanford’s Hoover Institute and the Center for Strategic
Studies at Georgetown; enhanced the influence of non-state, conservative civil society actors
like the National Association of Manufacturers and various Chambers of Commerce; and
contributed to federal lobbying pressure. These efforts influenced electoral politics and gained
actual political control. In the 1970s conservative lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable
– an organization with a “membership of leading CEOs” – began activism campaigns to
resurrect the public’s image of business and attack specific liberal legislation. Her work
contributes to understanding institutions, big business and political struggles during the rising
neoliberal era. [Bryan Knapp]
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Scholarly Resources
EH.Net
Operated by the Economic History Association, this is an amazing clearinghouse of reviews,
and syllabi. More importantly, its encyclopedia features articles on specific topics by very
prominent scholars. Also invaluable are the 24 essays on the “Great Books” of Economic
History.
The Exchange: The Business History Conference Blog
This is a very useful source for learning about conferences, new books, etc. from an
organization that is increasingly home for scholarship on the history of capitalism
Echoes: Economic History with Stephen Mihm
This is the Bloomberg economic history blog and they have a lot of good historians contributing.
Harvard Program on the Study of Capitalism
Sven Beckert and Christine Desan run an amazing workshop that maximizes graduate student
participation. Brown students have enrolled for credit (and should do so in the future).
Culture of the Market Network
Emerging from a mutli-university research program on the 19th-century US, this blog features
conference announcements and calls-for-papers of interest to all historians of capitalism.
Program in Early American Economy and Society
Housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia, this outfit hosts conferences, runs a book
series, and offers fellowships for research on the economic past in North America before 1860.
The LCP itself has put up a number of exhibitions on the American economy in recent years.
Business History Archives in the United States
This is a massive state-by-state archive created by the German Historical Institute.
The History Project of the Center for History and Economics at Harvard
With generous funding from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, this outfit is sponsoring a
series of upcoming graduate conferences and offers some fellowships too.
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Miscellaneous Bibliography (unannotated)
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Arnesen, Eric, Greene, Julie, and Laurie, Bruce, eds. Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the WorkingClass Experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Arnold, David. “Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich.” Modern
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Bayly, C.A. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 17701870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
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University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
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