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Seth Rockman
Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp.
439-466 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI3HQQV\OYDQLD3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2014.0043
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Review Essay
What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?
SETH ROCKMAN
Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of NineteenthCentury America. Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii Ⳮ 358. Cloth,
$97.00; paper $32.00.)
Capitalism may be in crisis as an economic system, but it is thriving as a
subject within the historical profession. The ‘‘history of capitalism’’ now
organizes a book series at Columbia University Press, a seminar program
at the Newberry Library, a MOOC at Cornell University, a graduate
field at University of Georgia, and a tenure line at Brown University.
Undergraduate courses on American capitalism are filling lecture halls
at Princeton, Florida, and Loyola University Chicago, while the New
School for Social Research has launched its new Heilbroner Center for
Capitalism Studies. The topic has provided thematic unity to recent
annual meetings of the Social Science History Association and the Organization of American Historians. In the American Historical Association’s state-of-the-field volume American History Now, the history of
capitalism stands alongside established subfields like women’s history
and cultural history. A front-page article last year in the New York Times
carried the headline, ‘‘In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar.’’1
Seth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He thanks
Julia Ott, Lukas Rieppel, Sandy Zipp, and JER editor David Waldstreicher for
helpful advice with this essay.
1. Jennifer Schuessler, ‘‘In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar,’’ New
York Times, Apr. 7, 2013, A1; Sven Beckert, ‘‘History of American Capitalism,’’
in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011),
314–35. In addition to the Beckert overview, other recent assessments of the field
Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Fall 2014)
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‘‘This is news?’’ one could hear many early republic historians ask
with incredulity. The study of capitalism has long been a central concern
of our field. Forty years ago, the ‘‘new labor history’’ began recovering
the experiences of the first generation of American wage laborers in communities like Paterson, Rockdale, and Lowell. Very soon, artisans of
every trade had a historian to recount their declining economic power in
the face of capitalism’s rise. Graduate students in the 1980s cut their
teeth on farmers’ account books and rural mentalités, and few qualifying
exam lists lacked a section on ‘‘the transition to capitalism’’ debate. The
generation coming of age in the 1990s had ‘‘the market revolution’’
looming over its head, and in the wake of a Journal of the Early Republic
special issue on capitalism in 1996, social historians continued to argue
with Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby over the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. Over the last decade, SHEAR conferences have
featured sessions on capitalism as a force of liberation or destruction, as
a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon, and as ideology or a structure.
As often as not, experienced commentators have alerted younger
presenters to the classic works of Samuel Rezneck, Oscar and Mary
Handlin, or George Rogers Taylor, extending the field’s historiographical genealogy ever deeper into the past. If academic generations define
themselves against their immediate predecessors, how many ‘‘revisionist’’
include Jeffrey Sklansky, ‘‘The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social
Histories of Capitalism,’’ Modern Intellectual History 9 (Apr. 2012), 233–48;
Sklansky, ‘‘Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,’’
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11 (Spring 2014), 23–46;
Kenneth Lipartito, ‘‘Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History,’’ Enterprise & Society 14 (Dec. 2013), 686–704; Louis Hyman, ‘‘Why Write
the History of Capitalism?’’ Symposium Magazine, July 8, 2013, http://www
.symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman; Noam
Maggor et al., ‘‘Teaching the History of Capitalism,’’ http://studyofcapitalism
.harvard.edu/node/132. In addition to providing themes for national meetings, the
history of capitalism has organized a number of recent conferences: ‘‘Calculating
Capitalism,’’ Columbia University, Apr. 25–26, 2014; ‘‘Histories of American
Capitalism,’’ Cornell University, Nov. 6–8, 2014; ‘‘Capitalizing on Finance: New
Directions in the History of Capitalism,’’ Huntington Library, Apr. 12–13, 2013;
‘‘Capitalism in America: A New History,’’ University of Georgia, Feb. 18, 2012;
‘‘The New History of American Capitalism,’’ Harvard University, Nov. 18–19,
2011; ‘‘Power and the History of Capitalism,’’ New School of Social Research,
Apr. 15–16, 2011; ‘‘Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic
Development,’’ Brown University and Harvard University, Apr. 7–9, 2011.
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historians have humbly discovered that their scholarly grandparents had
in fact been exploring the same questions half a lifetime earlier? This
‘‘new’’ history of capitalism might be a testament to good branding
(appropriately) rather than original insight, less a new field than a fad.
Scholars identifying themselves with the ‘‘new’’ history of capitalism—
and I count myself in these ranks—make no pretense of having discovered a new field. Many historians working under this rubric are quick
to credit their undergraduate teachers and graduate advisors: Elizabeth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, and Eric Foner at Columbia, or JeanChristophe Agnew and Michael Denning at Yale, to name only two
clusters of influential faculty who have been talking about capitalism for
decades. For those interested in parlor games, younger historians of capitalism can reach Agnew or Blackmar in about half the steps required to
get to Kevin Bacon. Columbia- and Yale-trained students have been at
the forefront of institutionalizing the history of capitalism elsewhere;
none with more success than Sven Beckert, whose Program on the Study
of Capitalism at Harvard has placed recent graduates into faculty positions at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, UC–Berkeley, Cornell
University, and University of Pennsylvania. Yet, not all roads lead back
to Cambridge, let alone New Haven and Morningside Heights, with the
field’s institutional genealogy looking less like a family tree than an overgrown forest of departments, centers, and programs. Consider the range
of affiliations of doctoral students receiving funding from the Library
Company of Philadelphia’s Program in Early American Economy and
Society or appearing on now-ubiquitous history-of-capitalism conference
panels. Complicating matters further, many of the dissertations (recent
and underway) in the field are directed by faculty members who do not
identify themselves primarily as historians of capitalism; take, for example, William Cronon and Thomas Sugrue, two graduate mentors better
identified with the respective subfields of environmental and urban history. But even doctoral advisors coming to history of capitalism through
the more predicable routes of labor and business history—Nelson
Lichtenstein and Colleen Dunlavy, for instance—would offer idiosyncratic accounts of the field’s origins. Sven Beckert might highlight the
importance of Europeanists like Eric Hobsbawm, William H. Sewell, Jr.,
and E. P. Thompson in shaping a field that nonetheless maintains a
distinctive Americanist lineage. One imagines Richard John making a
compelling case for Alfred Chandler as history of capitalism’s progenitor,
while the New Labor history of Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery
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would feature prominently for Jefferson Cowie, Rosemary Feurer, and
Scott Reynolds Nelson. William J. Novak, Robin Einhorn, and Brian
Balogh might credit American Political Development (a move in 1980s
and 1990s political science and sociology toward the history of institutions) with redirecting historians’ gaze toward the state’s role in the
economy. A dozen other historiographies might appear in competing
accounts of the field’s genealogy. Suffice it to say, the contours of the
field stretch beyond just a handful of programs and advisors.
What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy is less institutional
than intellectual, as the field has opened new vistas on the past by pursuing its questions differently from an earlier scholarship. First, the current
scholarship has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of
capitalism. Few works in the field begin with an explicit statement of
what the author means by capitalism. If the goal is to figure out what
capitalism is and how it has operated historically, scholars seem willing
to let capitalism float as a placeholder while they look for ground-level
evidence of a system in operation. The empirical work of discovery takes
precedence over the application of theoretical categories: A question like
‘‘What might men’s grooming products or Congressional tariff debates
tell us about capitalism?’’ organizes the inquiry, not ‘‘What does capitalism tell us about razors and rate schedules?’’ Recent work shows little
interest in demarcating certain economic activities or actors as precapitalist or proto-capitalist relative to a predetermined standard of actual
capitalism. By extension, ‘‘transitions’’ are not an overarching preoccupation of the recent scholarship, with less attention given to the timing
of a ‘‘market revolution,’’ shifts between modes of production, or the
contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. As the turmoil of the
current global economy has revealed a system wildly inconsistent with
theorized accounts of ‘‘pure’’ capitalism—it isn’t like the state has become
less relevant to the economy today than it was in 1750 or that free markets have ended human trafficking—historians have shown greater comfort with the ambiguities of early America capitalism. Once-essential
boundaries, as between mercantilism and capitalism, diminish in importance as scholars recognize the state’s geopolitical interest in organizing
markets and generating revenue up through the present day. Likewise,
the space between moral economy and market economy appears less
obvious as historians assert that culture (implicit in traditionalism of the
former) also governs the latter despite its presumed profit-maximizing
rationality. The new scholarship embraces the ‘‘varieties of capitalism,’’
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to use the title of an influential volume in political science on the mutability of capitalism across chronologies and geographies.2
Secondly, recent scholarship alters the periodization of U.S. history,
with particular consequence for early republic specialists who have long
claimed capitalism’s story, or at least its rise, as their own. After all, ours
is the era of the Erie Canal, de-skilled artisans, and trans-Atlantic radicals, plus three major panics and a bank war!3
Stealing some of our thunder, the history of capitalism tends to situate
the early United States in the sweep of an early modern global history
defined by commercial integration, the fiscal–military state, and the valorization of instrumental knowledge. For example, commodity studies like
Jennifer Anderson’s Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America
and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History dexterously
bridge the eras of colonization and industrialization. Other scholars have
similarly deepened the field’s chronological range: Recent syntheses by
Joyce Appleby and Christopher Tomlins span more than three centuries.4
The more specialized scholarship on U.S. capitalism rarely confines
itself to the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism
and Risk in America begins with the 1841 Creole slave revolt and ends
in the Progressive Era. Scott Reynolds Nelson’s A Nation of Deadbeats:
2. Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional
Foundations of Comparative Advantage (New York, 2001). For commentary, see
‘‘ ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ Roundtable,’’ Business History Review 84 (Winter
2010), 637–74; Richard Deeg and Gregory Jackson, ‘‘Towards a More Dynamic
Theory of Capitalist Variety,’’ Socio–Economic Review 5 (Jan. 2007), 149–79.
3. For the best recent overview, see John L. Larson, The Market Revolution in
America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (New York,
2010). Some of the early republic’s claims on capitalism were articulated in Alfred
F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of
American Radicalism (DeKalb, IL, 1993); and especially Michael Merrill, ‘‘Putting
‘Capitalism’ in its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,’’ William and Mary
Quarterly 52 (Apr. 1995), 315–26.
4. Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York,
2014); Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New
York, 2010); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York, 2010).
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An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters starts with
William Duer in debtors’ prison in 1792 and concludes during the New
Deal. Paul Lucier’s excellent book on scientific entrepreneurs and the
energy industry runs from 1820 to 1890, Caroline Fisk’s award-winning
history of intellectual property travels from 1800 to 1930, and two recent
dissertations on accounting (1750–1880) and actuarial science (1830–
1930) boast chronologies that defy the neat bookends of the early republic. Indeed, neither the American Revolution nor the Civil War plays a
determinative role in these narratives, marking a departure from an earlier historiography depicting capitalism as the consequence of the former
and the cause of the latter.5
Third, consistent with its disavowal of theoretical definitions and
recalibrated chronologies that span the Civil War, the new scholarship
recognizes slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism. Of
course, slavery has long been central to debates over British capitalism,
beginning with the 1944 publication of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and
Slavery. Although the United States also had an industrial revolution
reliant upon slave-grown cotton, the American historiography had generally considered slavery as a bounded regional economy, marking the
South as a laggard, rather than a leader, in national economic development.6
A wave of new scholarship, however, has positioned southern slaveholders as architects of a capitalist system predicated on commodity
5. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and
Risk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of
Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York,
2012); Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in
America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore, 2008); Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge:
Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800–1930
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Caitlin C. Rosenthal, ‘‘From Memory to Mastery:
Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1880,’’ PhD diss., Harvard University,
2012; Daniel B. Bouk, ‘‘The Science of Difference: Developing Tools of Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry, 1830–1930,’’ PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 2009.
6. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944); Joseph E.
Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York, 2002). On the absence of
slavery in American economic history, see Seth Rockman, ‘‘The Unfree Origins
of American Capitalism,’’ in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, PA, 2006), 335–61.
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production, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and lengthy
chains of trans-Atlantic finance. The framework of ‘‘Second Slavery’’—
highlighting slavery’s nineteenth-century regeneration in Brazil, Cuba,
and the U.S. under ‘‘modern’’ regimes of industrial management—has
proven especially productive. By dislodging wage labor as the sine qua
non of capitalism, historians of capitalism are able to consider labor
exploitation in a wider range of contexts, and especially to appreciate the
interdependence of plantation agriculture and factory production. Slavery also functioned as property regime in which, to quote one scholar,
slaves were worked ‘‘financially as well as physically’’ to store and transfer wealth, to access credit, and to stabilize an under-regulated system of
paper money. Relative to other subfields of U.S. history, the history of
capitalism may be the place where slavery assumes the most central position within the larger national narrative.7
Fourth, the new scholarship on capitalism integrates a variety of subfields and methodologies under one capacious heading. If nothing else,
the study of capitalism has woven together business history, labor history, economic history, political economy, and the history of economic
7. Bonnie Martin, ‘‘Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,’’
Journal of Southern History 76 (Nov. 2010), 817–66, quote on 866. Exemplary
recent work includes Caitlin C. Rosenthal, ‘‘From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1880,’’ Enterprise & Society 14 (Dec. 2013),
732–48; Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2012); Michael O’Malley,
Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America (Chicago,
2012), esp. 44–82; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire
in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), esp. 252–54. One theoretical
touchstone is Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and
the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC, 2005). For ‘‘Second Slavery,’’ see Dale
W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy
(Lanham, MD, 2004); Anthony E. Kaye, ‘‘The Second Slavery: Modernity in the
Nineteenth–Century South and the Atlantic World,’’ Journal of Southern History
75 (Aug. 2009), 627–50; Daniel Rood, ‘‘Plantation Technocrats: A Social History
of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830–1860,’’ PhD diss., University of California–Irvine, 2010; David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The
Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (New
York, 2012), 19–63. For an overview of this historiography, see Seth Rockman,
‘‘Slavery and Capitalism,’’ Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (Mar. 2012), 5, and
online supplement at http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civilwar-era-studies/the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies-slavery-and-capitalism/.
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thought, and in doing so, has sought to revitalize subfields that (to put it
politely) had fallen out of favor in the profession. Many un-cool topics—
tariffs, infrastructure, marine insurance—are now hot. But the redemption of these subjects is neither a rear-guard action, nor a repudiation of
the last thirty years of social and cultural history. To the contrary, the
history of capitalism has shown such strength precisely for its embrace
of critical theory and the experiences of workers, consumers, and entrepreneurs removed from the seats of power. For the early republic, just
consider well-received books like Scott Sandage’s Born Losers: A History
of Failure in America, Stephen Mihm’s Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Jane Kamensky’s
The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s
First Banking Collapse, and Brian Luskey’s On the Make: Clerks and the
Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. Rosanne Currarino
has recently identified the early republic as the most fertile site of a new
‘‘history of cultural economy,’’ by which she means the re-appropriation
of the economic past by scholars willing to interrogate ‘‘the economic’’
as a cultural and linguistic construction. Evaluating cultural history more
generally, James W. Cook foregrounds the history of capitalism for its
innovative melding of ‘‘signs and structures.’’ As if to convey the blending of disparate methodologies, Cornell’s Louis Hyman has offered
‘‘Foucault and regressions’’ as the ultimate aspiration of the field.8
Finally, the history of capitalism fundamentally functions as critique,
but not in ways that align with a single intellectual tradition or school of
political thought. Scholars working in the field are dubious of the neoclassical orthodoxies that prevail in Economics departments, especially
presumptions of utility-maximizing humans and self-regulating markets
inexorably moving towards equilibrium. Many of the fundamentals of
8. Rosanne Currarino, ‘‘Toward a History of Cultural Economy,’’ Journal of
the Civil War Era 2 (Dec. 2012), 564–85; James W. Cook, ‘‘The Kids Are Alright:
On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,’’ American Historical Review 117 (June
2012), 746–71; Hyman as quoted in New York Times, Apr. 7, 2013. On cultural
history as a methodology for the economic past, start with the Journal of Cultural
Economy, especially its ‘‘Fictions of Finance’’ special issue, 6 (2013). See also Per
H. Hansen, ‘‘Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach,’’ Business
History Review 86 (Winter 2012), 693–717; and two canonical articles: Timothy
Mitchell, ‘‘Fixing the Economy,’’ Cultural Studies 12 (Jan. 1998), 82–101; and
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display,’’ Critical
Inquiry 21 (Winter 1995), 434–67.
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Marxism appear equally teleological, especially a stadial theory of history
that predetermines capitalism’s rise and fall. To be sure, a focus on ‘‘the
commodity’’ and the presumption of a relationship between market,
state, and society betray the field’s debt to Marx, but recent scholarship
has shied away from Marxist terminology; half-jokingly, one might call
the field Marxish since its commitment to that tradition often begins and
ends with the project of demystifying capitalism. At the most basic level,
the field’s intervention is to de-naturalize capitalism, to provide the history of a system that the dominant culture depicts as timeless and irresistible, even in the midst of crisis. Whether they take their cues from David
Harvey, Cedric J. Robinson, or scholars writing under the standard of
subaltern studies, from the photography of Allan Sekula, or from a spell
of post-collegiate employment in management consulting, historians of
capitalism refuse to give ‘‘markets’’ a trans-historical agency. ‘‘The market’’ is a euphemism for actual economic actors (people) and institutions
(law and culture) that shape how economic power is exerted and experienced. Indeed, state power is never far from the surface, with attention
particularly focused on the role of law in setting the rules under which
economic activity takes place; for that reason, history of capitalism and
political economy often appear as synonymous in calls-for-papers and
job listings.
The history of capitalism might be thought of as comparable to Science Studies (or STS), an enterprise that similarly seeks to de-naturalize
processes that appear inevitable under the heading of ‘‘progress.’’ Both
undertakings interrogate their very subjects—science, capitalism—as contested terrain on which claims to authority and social power are made
and exercised. Presuming nothing to be inevitable, historians of capitalism and STS scholars embed what they study in a matrix of social relations, cultural practices, and institutional arrangements operating under
specific, yet always contingent, historical circumstances. The recent
financial crisis promoted cross-fertilization between the fields, as scholars
in the sociology, philosophy, and history of science like Donald MacKenzie and Philip Mirowski have interrogated economics, capitalism’s
legitimating discourse, as a form of knowledge production complicit in
creating the phenomena it purports to describe.9
9. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape
Markets (Cambridge, MA, 2006); MacKenzie, Material Markets: How Economic
Agents Are Constructed (New York, 2009); MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia
Siu, eds., Do Economists Shape Markets? On the Performativity of Economics
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Akin to historians of science who consider patronage, laboratory
space, and the prevailing political climate as essential to new discoveries
in chemistry or physics, historians of capitalism have also been drawn to
questions of infrastructure—less in the literal sense of the roads and wires
facilitating commerce and more in the sense of the submerged architecture—material, legal, and ideological—that makes a highway system or
telecommunication network plausible in the first place. Like the popular
David Macaulay books that rip the skin off a skyscraper or the walls
off a castle, the current scholarship presumes that behind something as
‘‘simple’’ as a dollar bill or a phone bill there’s an entire universe waiting
to be revealed. With an eye toward technology in the broadest sense of
the word, the field’s governing questions are more likely ‘‘How does it
work?’’ than ‘‘What does it mean?’’
Other commentators might stress a different set of scholarly moves at
the heart of the new history of capitalism. It is certainly in dialogue with
efforts to revitalize business history and labor history, projects clearly
articulated by the editors of leading journals in both fields. Walter A.
Friedman and Geoffrey Jones re-launched Business History Review in
2010 with a call for ambitious, multidisciplinary work in dialogue with
interlocutors other than the ghost of Alfred Chandler. On the pages of
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Leon Fink connected the robustness of the field to a newfound willingness to engage
‘‘the surrounding political economy of state and business enterprise.’’ It
will not suffice to pin workers’ struggles on the abstraction of capital-C
Capital, nor on a set of caricatured plutocrats resembling Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons; the best work in the field understands factory owners,
shop-floor supervisors, and anti-labor politicians as multifaceted actors
operating from complex motives.10
(Princeton, NJ, 2007); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste:
How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York, 2013); Mirowski,
More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics
(New York, 1991). See also Mary S. Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (New York, 2012); Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg,
eds., Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology
Studies (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005).
10. Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones, ‘‘Business History: Time for
Debate,’’ Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011), 1–8. For a similar exhortation, see the ‘‘Forum on Method and Concept in Business History,’’ Enterprise &
Society 14 (Sept. 2013), 435–510, especially Christine Meisner Rosen, ‘‘What Is
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The history of capitalism is also clearly in conversation with the New
Institutional Economics. Both stress the socially constructed constraints
that organize production, distribution, and consumption; but while
economists like Paul A. David or Douglass C. North would credit formal
and informal institutions with reducing transactional uncertainty, historians of capitalism would implicate law and culture in the unequal prospects and liabilities that disparate actors carry into the marketplace.11
Finally, capitalism’s history is an urgent concern for some legal scholars and political scientists, especially those working under the auspices
of International Political Economy (IPE). Disputing economists’ claims
that markets summon money into being as an arbitrary marker of value
to facilitate exchange, scholars like Christine Desan argue that currency
is a product of public governance and an expression of political authority
that shapes what is understood as ‘‘the market’’ in a given society and
how it functions.12
A decade ago, readers of the Journal of the Early Republic previewed
some features of the history of capitalism in a special issue entitled,
‘‘Whither the Early Republic?’’ There, James L. Huston anticipated that
‘‘governance and attention to the actual functioning of the marketplace’’
would increasingly organize scholarship under the capacious label of
‘‘political economy.’’13
Business History?’’ 475–85. For labor history, see Leon Fink, ‘‘The Great Escape:
How a Field Survived Hard Times,’’ Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of
the Americas 8 (Spring 2011), 109–15 (quote on 112).
11. Douglass C. North, ‘‘Institutions,’’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 5
(Winter 1991), 97–112; Paul A. David, ‘‘Why Are Institutions the ‘Carriers of
History’?: Path Dependence and the Evolution of Conventions, Organizations,
and Institutions,’’ Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 5 (1994), 205–20.
12. Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (New York, forthcoming); Desan, ‘‘The Market as a Matter of Money:
Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History,’’ Law
and Social Inquiry 30 (Winter 2005), 1–60; Desan and many others are featured
in ‘‘Money Matters: The Law, Economics, and Politics of Currency,’’ special issue
of Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11 (Jan. 2010). Historically oriented works in
International Political Economy include Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital:
A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ, 2008); Mark Blyth,
Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth
Century (New York, 2002).
13. James L. Huston, ‘‘Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered: The Early
Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy,’’ Journal of
the Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004), 219–31 (quote on 221). For an excellent
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In the same volume, David Waldstreicher, Amy Dru Stanley,
Stephanie Smallwood, and Walter Johnson planted slavery and its attendant ideology of white supremacy squarely at the heart of early republic
capitalism. But more importantly, their essays developed one of the
watchwords of the new history of capitalism: commodification. As Smallwood explained, ‘‘We know a great deal about commodities and their
fetishization, but commodification—the process by which things are made
into commodities—remains less rigorously interrogated.’’ Accordingly,
the history of capitalism must dismantle the black box that obscures the
substantial work involved in transforming aspects of the material world
into exchangeable units. Very quickly, commodification directs attention
to the social production of knowledge. Standards for measuring, grading,
and pricing, for example, can never be presupposed, but emerge in contests over authority and expertise, whether regarding the legitimacy of
any quantitative metric or the legitimacy of the technology deployed in
rendering it or representing it. At bottom, commodification is a discursive process in which language and the means of its transmission—think
of an early modern prices current, the legalistic formality of a contract,
or a written IOU from the government—do the epistemological work of
creating goods that can be bought, sold, and consumed. These insights
inform much of the new scholarship and help explain the particular
interest in the account book as a bedrock technology of capitalism and
in money as a semiotic system.14
testament to political economy, see Richard R. John, guest editor, ‘‘Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth–Century America,’’ Journal of Policy
History 18, no. 1 (2006), 1–20. See also Nancy Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (New York, 2010); Lindsay
Schakenbach, ‘‘From Discontented Bostonians to Patriotic Industrialists: The
Boston Associates and the Transcontinental Treaty, 1790–1825,’’ New England
Quarterly 84 (Sept. 2011), 377–401; Gautham Rao, ‘‘The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution,’’ PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2008; Ariel Ron, ‘‘Developing the Country: ‘Scientific Agriculture’ and the Roots of the Republican Party,’’ PhD diss., University of
California–Berkeley, 2012; David H. Schley, ‘‘Making the Capitalist City: The
B&O Railroad and Urban Space in Baltimore, 1827–1877,’’ PhD diss., Johns
Hopkins University, 2013; Stephen Chambers, ‘‘The American State of Cuba:
The Business of Cuba and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1797–1825,’’ PhD diss., Brown
University, 2013.
14. David Waldstreicher, ‘‘The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told
By Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 24
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Standing alongside commodification in the scholarship is another
processual noun: financialization. By recovering the vast amount of cultural, legal, and technological work involved in making securities markets, scholars have rethought the histories of investment, savings, and
risk. Although the term financialization is often associated with the dominance of the ‘‘financial services industry’’ in the late twentieth century,
historians see a transformational moment in England’s early modern
‘‘Financial Revolution’’ when sovereign debt proliferated and personal
and commercial credit migrated from ledger books into circulating
financial instruments that could be assigned, exchanged, repackaged into
investment opportunities for third parties, and ultimately disassociated
from such material referents as a bushel of grain or plot of land; one
scholar has posited ‘‘credit fetishism’’ as a useful label for this process of
abstraction. The allure of future revenue streams predicated on past acts
of money-lending required new temporal horizons, a new mathematics
for calculating depreciation and probability, and new understandings of
mortality mediated through insurance policies and trusts. The chains
of credit between large investment houses, state-chartered banks, and
(Summer 2004), 268–78; Amy Dru Stanley, ‘‘Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some
Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations,’’ ibid., 279–88; Stephanie
Smallwood, ‘‘Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of Anti–Slavery
Ideology in the Early Republic,’’ ibid., 289–98 (quote on 291); Walter Johnson,
‘‘The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,’’ ibid.,
299–308. The word commoditization also appears in the literature, as in Igor
Kopytoff, ‘‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,’’
in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun
Appadurai (New York, 1986), 64–94. On account books, ledgers, and the broader
turn to quantification, see Anthony G. Hopwood and Peter Miller, eds., Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (New York, 1994); Peter Miller, ‘‘Calculating Economic Life,’’ Journal of Cultural Economy 1 (2008), 51–64; Stephanie
Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 33–64; Caitlin Rosenthal, ‘‘Storybook-Keepers:
Narratives and Numbers in Nineteenth-Century America,’’ Common–place: The
Interactive Journal of Early American Life 12 (Apr. 2012), http://common-place.org/vol-12/no-03/rosenthal/; Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York, 2014). On money, see Marieke
de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis, MN,
2005), xxv; Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New
York, 2006); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008).
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entrepreneurial borrowers rendered property ownership into a social
fiction, one whose flimsiness was all too often revealed whenever the
chain broke. This was especially vivid in the financing of slavery, to
which scholars attribute such macroeconomic crises as the South Sea
Bubble and the Panic of 1837, as well as the personal tragedies of countless enslaved families left at the mercy of the auctioneer’s gavel whenever
a planter went bankrupt. By following the money—whether to a farmer’s
mortgage owned by the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company
or to an annuity generating income for a London widow based on a
minute fractional share of a West Indian plantation—historians of capitalism resist ‘‘investment’’ as a natural economic concept floating above
social relations, cultural production, and political economy. The concept
of financialization, like that of commodification, attests to the field’s abiding interest in de-naturalizing the entire range of goods and services that
might otherwise be presupposed as inherent to ‘‘the economy.’’ As processes suggesting the agency of human beings rather than the autonomous
operations of market forces, both terms impel scholars to excavate the
relations of power that underlay what can be bought and sold (and by
whom and on what terms) at a given moment in history.15
It would be hard to find a better introduction to the history of capitalism than Capitalism Takes Command, edited by Michael Zakim and
15. For the early modern period, see Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit:
The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge MA, 2011), 230 (for
credit fetishism); William Deringer, ‘‘Calculated Values: The Politics and Epistemology of Economic Numbers in Britain, 1688–1738,’’ PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012; Eli Cook, ‘‘The Pricing of Everyday Life,’’ Raritan 32 (Winter
2013), 109–21. For the nineteenth century, see Tamara Plakins Thornton, ‘‘ ‘A
Great Machine’ or a ‘Beast of Prey’: A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtors
in an Age of Capitalist Transformation,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Winter
2007), 567–97; Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and
the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York, 2013); Nicholas
Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British
Society at the End of Slavery (New York, 2010). For the twentieth century, the
term is often associated with Greta R. Krippner, ‘‘The Financialization of the
American Economy,’’ Socio-Economic Review 3 (May 2005), 173–208; Louis
Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ, 2011);
Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (New
York, 2009). More generally, Aaron Carico and Dara Orenstein, ‘‘The Fictions of
Finance,’’ Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014), 3–13; David Graeber, Debt:
The First 5,000 Years (New York, 2011).
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Gary J. Kornblith. The volume reflects the field’s multigenerational character, situating foundational scholars of early republic social history
alongside the mid-career standard-bearers of cultural history, intellectual
history, and political economy. An explicit homage to Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command and with gestures toward Karl
Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the book considers ‘‘the long nineteenth century,’’ attentive to the massive disjunctures of the Civil War
and Reconstruction but not bound by them or indeed, by any other
major milestones in American political history. These essays are consistent with a number of general trends in the field: resistance to a fixed
definition of capitalism, relative indifference to the ‘‘worlds that were
lost’’ perspectives of an earlier ‘‘transition’’ literature, attentiveness to
slavery, ambitious blending of methods and subfields, and a preoccupation with unmasking the hidden operations of commodification and
financialization. The editors position the volume as ‘‘a collective attempt
to ‘bring the economy back’ into American social and cultural history’’
(7), but the book’s greater effect is showcasing the value of social and
cultural history for understanding the economic past, especially in
‘‘arguing that there was nothing natural, preordained, or predictable’’
(7) about capitalism’s American incarnation. By title, Capitalism Takes
Command indicates that something specific happened over the course of
the nineteenth century, elegantly formulated as ‘‘capital’s transformation
into an ‘ism’ ’’ (1). The logic and law of business spilled over from the
realm of economic exchange to organize society and its politics, everyday
practices, and culturally dominant understandings of self. To explain
how, the editors suggest a new set of questions to guide historical
inquiry: not ‘‘Who built America?’’ but rather ‘‘ ‘Who sold America?’
or perhaps more to the point, ‘Who financed those sales?’ ’’ (12). The
subsequent essays show the fruitfulness of such an approach, but also
expose the vulnerabilities of a volume lacking any contribution invested
in that once-classic hallmark of the history of capitalism: proletarianization.
To be sure, steering clear of factory-based wage labor can also be seen
as one of the book’s most productive gambits. An earlier scholarship
had timed capitalism’s arrival to the moment when industry supplanted
agriculture as the centerpiece of the economy. Capitalism presumptively
came late to the United States as frontier farms lured would-be yeoman
families westward; the land served as an impediment to, if not a bulwark
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against, capitalism. The essays in Capitalism Take Command argue otherwise, making western lands—so readily rendered into securities—
capitalism’s strength rather than its weakness. This is a move associated
with the New Western History of the 1980s and 1990s, an influence on
the history of capitalism too rarely acknowledged. Christopher Clark
makes the expropriation of Indian lands foundational to American capitalism, as conquered territories became private property that sustained a
credit economy in purchase mortgages for farms and advances on the
crops that would soon follow. Clark does not use the fashionable ‘‘settler
colonialism’’ to collapse imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy
into one totalizing force of dispossession; instead he considers an American version of ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ (36) in which common white
families gained access to private property at the expense of Native people
but soon found that land ownership left them more, not less, vulnerable
to market forces they could not control. Indeed, these settler families
organized politically against the more visible beneficiaries of their toil:
eastern financiers, commodity speculators, and railroad barons. Clark
finds multiple nineteenth-century capitalisms, including an admittedly
ambivalent agrarian one that continued to rely upon family labor and
local networks of exchange. He conveys his own ambivalence about
placing farming families under the rubric of capitalism, even as he
foregrounds the agricultural sector as the driver of nineteenth-century
economic development.
American farms did not merely produce unrivaled amounts of grain
and cotton: They also generated a host of securities that launched the
American financial services industry. Elizabeth Blackmar begins this
story with the commonplace observation that ‘‘when someone died,
property changed hands’’ (93). The patriarchal system of inheritance
that had long disciplined sons during a man’s life and sustained his
widow upon his death gave way to a new kind of estate administration,
one relying on the intermediation of large corporations to provision survivors and future generations with revenue from pooled investments.
Probate courts encouraged estate executors to liquidate real and chattel
property and to invest the resulting funds; put differently, sell the farm,
park the money in a trust company, and then collect one’s patrimony in
a regularized share of the trust’s returns from loaning money at interest
to scores of other families trying to buy a farm. Enterprises like New
York Life Insurance and Trust Company (chartered 1830) endeavored
to protect and grow family wealth, but controversies arose over their turn
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away from mortgages toward more speculative investments like railroad
stocks: Was this a dereliction of fiduciary responsibility? Or was the
greater dereliction in failing to seize upon lucrative investment opportunities? Although courts and legislatures in the 1850s and 1860s
steered investment back toward land, new real-estate trusts funneled family wealth into late-nineteenth-century urban development. Downtown
office buildings and other commercial properties now generated a stream
of rents for the beneficiaries of the deceased, but also for the trusts’
own directors, managers, and in some cases, shareholders. Longstanding
practices designed to protect widows and orphans ultimately blurred
‘‘family property and corporate property’’ (117), as patriarchal security
and investment securities became irrevocably intertwined.
Jonathan Levy adds a further wrinkle to this story of ‘‘financial systemization,’’ namely the life insurance policies that purported to protect the
‘‘landed independence’’ of farming families. To establish a farm on the
Great Plains in the 1870s and 1880s required substantial capital, and so
settlers took loans to meet the high start-up costs. But because a mortgaged farm was not a secure asset to bequeath to one’s wife and children,
many men availed themselves of life insurance to provide for dependents
in the case of death or injury. This was more than a ‘‘hedge,’’ but a
reconceptualization of value in the era of liberal self-ownership: ‘‘a mortgaged farmer’s human capital was his most valuable asset’’ (53–54), not
the land on which he practiced subsistence agriculture. A man might
have difficulty owning a farm, but he owned his own life and could sell
it as ‘‘risk’’ to an insurance firm. Here’s where it gets interesting: Where
did those insurance companies park all the premiums that flowed eastward from western farmers? In debenture bonds that clustered western
farm mortgages into a single investment product backed by real property
(the farms) and insulated against the default of any one particular farmer.
‘‘As the mortgage and insurance markets systematized and intersected,’’
explains Levy, ‘‘western farmers became both agents and objects of a
newly abstract power’’ (41). The New England Mortgage Security Company and other firms responsible for these new financial instruments
held western farmers to a rigid payment schedule, one that generated
substantial stress for working families and a resigned sense that farming
was no different from any other business in its urgent focus on generating
income to meet bills. Levy does not glorify the independence of the
antebellum yeomanry, but over the subsequent decades ‘‘[l]anded wealth
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became a dematerialized abstraction’’ and western farmers ‘‘became cogs
within an increasingly complex financial system’’ (41).
Convoluted networks of finance had a longer history in the slaveholding South. In 1828, Baring Brothers began marketing the bonds of a
state-chartered Louisiana bank to European investors. Thanks to favorable legislation, the bank’s bonds were guaranteed by Louisiana’s taxpayers. Using the money it raised abroad through these bond sales, the
Louisiana bank made loans to local slaveholders, who used the very
slaves they were purchasing with the loans as collateral. In this way,
Louisiana’s slaves, coerced into producing cotton under a regime of
intensifying violence and readily converted into cash on the auction
block, sustained a trans-Atlantic chain of credit. This process was
repeated numerous times in neighboring states and involved a number
of prominent European banking houses. Foreign capital—not to mention,
foreign demand for cotton—helped launch an economic boom, but at
immeasurable human costs to enslaved men and women, who endured a
second middle passage to the southwestern frontier, then an intensified
labor regime in the cotton fields, and finally the forced sales accompanying the bust that arrived in 1837. ‘‘The financialization of American slavery,’’ argues Edward E. Baptist, ‘‘. . . turned people into numbers, the
values of their bodies and labor into paper, chopped them, recombined
them by legislative fiat, carried them in suitcases across the ocean, and
sold them to people on other continents—some of whom undoubtedly
believed that they believed in emancipation’’ (90–91). In an essay explicitly engaging the 2008 financial crisis, Baptist recreates an earlier
moment when the ‘‘collusion of state and financial elites’’ (72–73) lowered regulatory checks on the securities market and normalized rampant
speculation. Baptist places slavery at the center of the Panic of 1837, and
reminds readers that the fictions of finance had real consequences of
unimaginable horror in the lives of American slaves. Connecting the
social history of the plantation to trans-Atlantic high finance, Baptist’s
polemical and unsparing essay is the must-read of the volume.
The volume’s other essay on slavery is Amy Dru Stanley’s exploration
of ‘‘slave breeding’’ and ‘‘free love,’’ two slurs in antebellum political
speech that posited North and South as fundamentally different even as
the national economy of cotton bound them closer together. Sectional
partisans used these loaded terms to articulate the boundaries of the
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market, resisting its intrusion on sacred intimate relations. Forced reproduction was a recurring theme in abolitionist exposes of slavery’s immorality, contributing to emerging northern understandings of freedom as
predicated on individual choice and self-ownership. Love featured
prominently in this discourse, especially once slaveholders seized on it
to construct their discourse of paternalism and an accompanying critique
of northern society as unnatural in its privileging of consent over obligation. ‘‘On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, therefore, love became a
potent measure of the opposition between slavery and freedom,’’
observes Stanley. ‘‘While proslavery doctrine exalted bondage as love,
abolitionism validated the right of self-owning persons to love freely’’
(136). Likewise, enslaved men and women constructed their own
notions of freedom around love and the ability to choose marriage partners for themselves. Although the essay disavows the empirical question
of slave breeding as a plantation practice, it conclusively invests slaveholders in slaves’ reproduction. ‘‘Especially in disputes over inheritance,
contract, and debt, masters and would-be masters told of aspiring to
grow slaves, not just crops’’ (137), so long as the word ‘‘breeding’’ was
never uttered aloud. Such disassociation did crucial work in creating
what might be called the South’s capitalist culture. Abolitionists’ fixation
on breeding set the terms of the North’s engagement with the market,
making it possible to define freedom as a matter of the heart and not
merely the pocketbook. Yet this too was self-delusion, as northerners
lacked the capacity to see their commercial economy (especially their
textile mills) as remotely connected to the South’s growing population of
slaves.
The cultural history of capitalism revels in such ironies, with Tamara
Plakins Thornton’s essay on the aesthetics of commercial infrastructure
a case in point. Thornton follows American tourists to the docks of
London and Liverpool where they encountered massive warehousing
complexes of such scale that only the language of the sublime could
describe them. This was a peculiar aesthetic response, for the sublime
belonged to the natural world and conveyed a kind of pleasurable terror
appropriate to witnessing an erupting volcano from a safe distance. But
a shipping depot? As ‘‘spectacles of rationalized economic activity’’
(172), the British docks exuded a transcendent power to summon and
organize the wealth of the world on a scale beyond the comprehension
of any single individual. ‘‘The docks stood as an aesthetic marker of
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emerging capitalist values: security, regularity, precision, impersonality’’
(196), and the kinds of Americans who might travel there and record
their observations were precisely those who might find pleasure in the
view. In other words, Thornton locates one of capitalism’s legitimating
discourses, wherein ‘‘[s]ailors, laborers, pilferers, and smugglers, storms
and tides, conflict and risk—all fade before the sublime vision of a perfect
mechanism’’ (198). These erasures situate capitalism outside the realm
of politics, using the association with nature’s vast power to suggest that
resistance is futile. Although Thornton does not pursue the contemporary analogy, her essay could very well be about twenty-first-century
container ships: massive, seemingly unmanned, storing vast outpourings
of human labor in bland steel boxes, organizing global supply chains
with a relentless efficiency, and also strangely beautiful.16
If capitalism found legitimacy in a visual aesthetic, those critiquing it
took inspiration from a literary one: melodrama. Jeffrey Sklansky, who
recently published one of the field’s most useful historiographical essays
in Modern Intellectual History, here reconstructs the political world of
William Leggett, the 1830s New York City democrat and fierce opponent
of state-chartered banks. Before becoming an editor and essayist, Leggett
had begun his career as an actor, which provided him ‘‘a repertoire of
settings, characters, plots, themes, and standards that enabled him to
find transcendent significance in the politics of corporations and currency’’ (201). Melodrama rose to popularity by virtue of its moral certainties, and from a young age Leggett saw the world in clear terms of
right versus wrong, good versus evil. Entering journalism in 1829, Leggett became a spokesman for New York’s workingmen and received (but
declined) the Locofoco nomination for mayor in 1836. The transformation of the urban economy proved incredibly disruptive for the city’s
artisans, but what alarmed Leggett was not the wage system, but rather
‘‘the rise of paper money and the marble-columned banks from whence
it flowed’’ (200). For Leggett, market relations could serve as a force of
16. The Forgotten Space, directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch (2010;
Amsterdam), DVD; Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping,
the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food
on Your Plate (New York, 2013). The parallels between nineteenth-century global
commerce and the current Wal-Mart economy are explored in Nelson Lichtenstein, ‘‘The Return of Merchant Capitalism,’’ International Labor and
Working-Class History 81 (Spring 2012), 8–27.
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liberation, unless corrupted by private corporations wielding state charters and issuing currency that lacked a basis in reality. Melodrama’s preference for transparency lent itself perfectly to attacking paper money as
a kind of misrepresentation, while also dividing the world into honest
laborers and the corrupt bankers who sought to defraud them. Leggett
and other 1830s commentators situated ‘‘the money question’’ in popular politics, not some esoteric realm of financial expertise. Even before
the dire conditions of the Panic of 1837, men like Leggett attributed
economic instability to political misrule, thereby summoning a reassuring
belief ‘‘that proper representation could reconcile older republican principles with new market practices, agrarian democracy with industrial
capitalism’’ (220). Melodrama may have relied on stark dichotomies, but
Sklansky reminds historians that Jacksonian-era political thought could
not be reduced to simple pro-market and anti-market positions.17
The prototypical figure of capitalism’s ambiguous reception was the
urban clerk, a striver with questionable prospects who Michael Zakim
calls ‘‘a model citizen of market society’’ (224). In a captivating essay,
Zakim places the clerk at the center of an organizational revolution predicated on paperwork. Capitalism’s paper technologies of invoices, inventories, and permits ‘‘turned the office into arguably the most important
production site in the industrializing economy’’ (229), for it was here (in
a Foucaultian turn) that clerks invented the ‘‘the market’’ through their
means of administering it. Zakim is particularly interested in the ‘‘production of capitalist knowledge’’ and the material forms of its organization and dissemination, topics that have brought the history of capitalism
into conversation with new scholarship in history of the book and science studies. A host of ‘‘commercial colleges’’ had emerged by the 1860s
to teach young men to handle a ledger, and this ‘‘capitalist pedagogy’’
made penmanship into both an ‘‘industrial technology’’ and ‘‘a highly
mobile form of property readily purchased on the open market at competitive prices’’ (242). A quick and clear hand was touted as a clerk’s
best prospect for upward mobility, but in the end, the clerk would never
be more than a hand, a replaceable worker ‘‘mass producing for an economy dependent on an exploding amount of information’’ (247). Still, his
particular form of work was indispensible not merely to the rise of the
bureaucratic office associated with Max Weber’s capitalist modernity nor
17. See note 1, above.
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to our present-day fascination with the ‘‘knowledge economy,’’ but to ‘‘a
redefinition of industry to mean the making of profits rather than the
making of things’’ (224). For Zakim, capitalism did not cause, but was
the product of a massive epistemological shift, albeit one relying less
upon treatises of political economy and more upon the 1840s equivalent
of Excel for Dummies.18
The administrative restructuring of firms into multidivisional units to
seize upon the proliferation of commercial information characterized
Gilded Age capitalism, but as Sean Patrick Adams argues, the transformational moment was a generation earlier during the Civil War era.
Northern states issued corporate charters at an unprecedented pace during the war, and while general incorporation laws had become common
over the previous decades, new provisions allowed firms greater autonomy to raise capital and particularly to operate in other states. For example, Massachusetts chartered seventy mining corporations in 1863 and
1864 to seek coal, copper, and gold in faraway Pennsylvania, Michigan,
and California. States offered corporations greater leeway in the name of
wartime exigencies, but soon came to depend on corporate taxes to meet
wartime expenses. New taxes on corporate income (and not merely fixed
property) comprised a growing percentage of state revenue, thus tying
the fiscal health of states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to the wellbeing of their corporations. No firms were more important to this political economy than the railroads, which prospered during the war under
18. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English
East India Company (Chicago, 2007); Adrian Johns, ‘‘Ink,’’ in Materials and
Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula
Klein and E. C. Spary (Chicago, 2009), 101–24; Jacob Soll, ‘‘From Note-Taking
to Data Banks: Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early Modern Europe,’’ Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010), 355–75; Josh Lauer,
‘‘From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial
Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,’’ Technology & Culture 49 (Apr. 2008),
301–24; 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 (Apr. 2005), 295–321; Ben Kafka, ‘‘Paperwork:
The State of the Discipline,’’ Book History 12 (2009), 340–53; Kafka, The Demon
of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York, 2012); Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 (Cambridge, MA,
2011); Christoph Hoffman and Barbara Wittman, ‘‘Introduction: Knowledge in
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the combined support of government contracts and reduced regulation.
The triumph of corporate interests was, in Adams’s estimation, ‘‘a domination born of wartime circumstances’’ (276). This future was augured
in West Virginia, a compelling place to see wartime policymakers create a
business-friendly regime from scratch. In its concessions to corporations,
West Virginia’s constitutional framers typified the broader northern
tendency ‘‘to construct an institutional framework that would attract
investment from across the nation, maintain strong ties with important
railroads, and abdicate significant regulatory prerogative in the interests
of keeping their states ‘capital friendly’ ’’ (274). The Civil War was hardly
bad for business (as economic historians had once argued), but ‘‘effected
an emancipation of an altogether different kind in the Northern states’’
(251).
There is one outlier in Capitalism Takes Command, an essay that
underscores the different sensibilities of traditional economic historians.
Robert E. Wright gives the corporation an earlier prominence in American capitalism by tracing the growing sums of money that antebellum
firms raised through the sale of securities. Here, high levels of investment
make sense because corporations make sense: They allow for economies
of scale, vertical integration, research and development, reduced production costs; and they channel capital to where it could do the most good.
‘‘Many Americans,’’ explains Wright, ‘‘. . . realized that corporations
were engines of economic growth and an arena where the upstart United
States led the world’’ (162). True, the 1830s witnessed the vilification of
the corporation in political discourse, but if enough people had truly
thought corporations evil, the quantity of money invested in them would
have gone down rather than up. Wright fashions an early republic ‘‘ownership society’’ in which American clamored for more corporations in
order to create more investment opportunities. ‘‘Ownership was
unequal—the rich could of course afford to own more shares and bigger
policies than the poor could—but it was open to all on equal terms’’
(161). Like the present-day high school janitor who ranks among the
‘‘investor class’’ by virtue of his municipal pension, the early republic
domestic servant whose employer deposited her weekly wages in a
the Making: Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques,’’ Science in Context
26 (June 2013), 203–13.
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mutual savings bank (lest she spend them inappropriately) could already
take pleasure in her ‘‘indirect corporate stock and bond ownership’’
(161).19
The only losers that Wright can identify in this new world of finance
are investors themselves, who sometimes saw potential income from their
investments sapped by ‘‘agency costs’’ associated with inefficient corporate governance. Wright has no use for the cultural work necessary to
create a popular culture of investment, taking it instead as a human proclivity simply awaiting an available outlet. Panics and corporate malfeasance have no part in the story, for if widows losing their life savings
at the hands of corrupt bank directors mattered in some larger way, then
aggregate rates of investment would have fallen—and again, they didn’t.
Unique among contributors to the volume, Wright seeks neither to denaturalize capitalism, nor to unmask its relations of power.20
So indifferent is Wright to capitalism’s human costs as documented
over generations of social history that the reader becomes nostalgic for
social history’s master narrative of struggle and resistance. And that’s
when the reader confronts the relative absence of privation in the volume
as a whole. Except for the collateralized slaves of Baptist’s essay, capitalism seems to generate anxiety but not real hardship, a sense of resignation but not a politics of outrage. This is a capitalism born without blood
19. For a comparable example of the gulf between traditional economic history
and the considerations of power and culture that characterize the history of capitalism, see Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native
Americans and the European Fur Trade (Philadelphia, 2010).
20. On the obstacles to making investment culturally legitimate and politically
viable, see Alex Preda, ‘‘The Rise of the Popular Investor: Financial Knowledge
and Investing in England and France, 1840–1880,’’ Sociological Quarterly 42
(Spring 2001), 205–32; Bryna Goodman, ‘‘Things Unheard of East or West:
Colonialism, Nationalism, and Cultural Contamination in Early Chinese
Exchanges,’’ in Twentieth–Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World, ed. Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman (New York,
2012), 57–77; Peter Knight, ‘‘Reading the Ticker Tape in the Late NineteenthCentury American Market,’’ Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (2013), 45–62; Julia
C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy
(Cambridge MA, 2011); Robert E. Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political
Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland (Urbana, IL, 2009); Courtney Fullilove, ‘‘The
Price of Bread: The New York City Flour Riot and the Paradox of Capitalist Food
Systems,’’ Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014), 15–41.
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dripping from its gaping maw, a capitalism that floats above the messiness of class conflict. In a thoughtful afterword, Jean-Christophe Agnew
identifies the tradeoffs involved in building capitalism’s history on ‘‘the
ordinary material practices that habituated Americans to the new systemic rules of capitalism as a market forms of life, and that did so in way
of which most Americans at the time were only dimly and bemusedly
aware’’ (279). The sense of contingency at the heart of the history of
capitalism project can disappear from view if capitalism is effectively a
non-event. And without state violence, the anomie of factory labor, and
the hunger pains of grinding poverty, a capitalism built upon the imperceptible processes of commodification and financialization is a capitalism
that appears the product of inexorable and irresistible forces; in other
words, it becomes re-mystified, not de-mystified.21
One remedy, as Agnew notes, would be to introduce more individual
capitalists into the story, specific actors to combat the anonymity that
prevails in the volume. Recent work in the field has brought an anthropological eye to nineteenth-century elites, situating their financial strategies in a range of domestic arrangements, intellectual engagements, and
cultural blindspots. Works like Richard White’s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of America are hardly flattering portraits of
capitalist heroes, but even the most prudent men of finance like Nathaniel Bowditch and Lewis Tappan led lives reflecting the central conflicts
of nineteenth-century America. Early republic scholars might be surprised to learn that Cornelius Vanderbilt’s career was far more interesting
in the first half of the nineteenth century than in the era of the Robber
Barons; born in 1794, the young Vanderbilt was the foremost pilot in
the tri-state area during the War of 1812 and by the 1840s had built
what still functions as the Northeast Corridor’s transportation network.
John Jacob Astor and the fur trade have received more popular than
scholarly attention, but following eastern capital westward to places like
Astoria would have the further advantage of engaging Native Americans
as participants in the history of capitalism.22
21. These criticisms are also articulated in Carico and Orenstein, ‘‘Fictions of
Finance.’’
22. Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., ‘‘The Limits of Homo
Economicus: An Appraisal of Early American Entrepreneurship,’’ Journal of the
Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004), 208–18; Andrew M. Schocket, ‘‘Thinking
about Elites in the Early Republic,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter
2005), 547–55; Thornton, ‘‘ ‘A Great Machine’ or a ‘Beast of Prey’ ’’; Lauer,
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Another remedy, of course, is to pay more attention to labor, whether
in its workbench materiality, its trans-Pacific organization (an important
topic in the global history of unfree labor), or its unwaged performance
in the service of social reproduction. The concept of the Industrial Revolution has largely disappeared from the history of capitalism, but there
remains much to discover by grounding a history of innovation in shopfloor discoveries and contests over work processes and intellectual
property. As the history of energy regimes is now attracting scholarly
attention, historians might focus on the labor relations structuring the
extraction of petroleum, whale oil, camphene, coal, and guano. The
question of what capitalism did for (or, to) women is a longstanding
subject of inquiry, but scholars continue to find new insights from women’s participation in the formal and informal sectors of the urban economy. Indeed, working people’s strategies in the informal sector may
reveal a competing history of finance and speculation. Because the early
republic labor market was so functionally dependent on categories of
social difference, work provides the clearest vantage on capitalism’s
investments in patriarchy and white supremacy.23
‘‘From Rumor to Written Record’’; T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life
of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, 2009); James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit:
How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo–American Capitalism (Cambridge,
MA, 2010); Rachel Tamar Van, ‘‘Free Trade and Family Values: Kinship Networks
and the Culture of Early American Capitalism,’’ PhD diss., Columbia University,
2011; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011); Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The
Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York, 2010); David Igler, The
Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York,
2013). On the larger relationship of Native Americans to the history of capitalism,
see Alexandra Harmon, Colleen O’Neill, and Paul C. Rosier, ‘‘Interwoven Economic Histories: American Indians in a Capitalist America,’’ Journal of American
History 98 (Dec. 2011), 698–722. See also Nancy Shoemaker, ‘‘Mr. Tashtego:
Native American Whalemen in Antebellum New England,’’ Journal of the Early
Republic 33 (Spring 2013), 109–32.
23. On workbench mentality, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The
Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010); Jeff Horn, Leonard N.
Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith, eds., Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 17–18; Fisk, Working Knowledge. On energy
regimes and extraction, see Edward Melillo, ‘‘The First Green Revolution: Debt
Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,’’ American
Historical Review 117 (Oct. 2012), 1028–60; Christopher F. Jones, Routes of
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Going forward, early republic scholars might find a productive conversation at the intersection of the history of capitalism and the history of
science. Already, there is a developing scholarship on the role of organic
chemistry in commercial farming, the rise of scientific consulting, the
relationship of materials engineering to building standards, and the legal
protection of intellectual property, to name only a few promising avenues
in recent research. The history of capitalism should find inspiration here,
both as history of science expands to subsume all forms of knowledge
production (including that about ‘‘the economy’’) and as the history of
capitalism continues to recognize processes like commodification as epistemological. At a moment when more things are for sale than ever
before—the right to pollute or bandwidth or ‘‘biocapital,’’ for example—it seems urgent to develop a longer history of how technologies,
discoveries, and the natural world enter the marketplace. The early
republic’s ranks of entrepreneurial tinkers, its enthusiasm for ‘‘useful
knowledge,’’ and its technological utopianism may provide an instructive
origins story for our contemporary culture’s valorization of the so-called
STEM fields and their ability to generate jobs and revenue.24
Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Sean Patrick Adams,
Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore,
2014); Jeremy Zallen, ‘‘American Lucifers: Makers and Masters of the Means of
Light, 1750–1900,’’ PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014. On Asian labor in
nineteenth-century industries, see Dael A. Norwood, ‘‘Trading in Liberty: The
Politics of the American China Trade, c.1784–1862,’’ PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012; Manu Mathew Vimalassery, ‘‘Skew Tracks: Racial Capitalism and
the Transcontinental Railroad,’’ PhD diss., New York University, 2011. On informal economies, see Gloria L. Main, ‘‘Women on the Edge: Life at Street Level
in the Early Republic,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Fall 2012), 331–47
(introduction to a special issue featuring five articles on women, poverty, and
informal economies); Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from
Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago, 2009); Joshua Greenberg,
Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New
York, 1800–1840 (New York, 2008); Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That
Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2009).
24. Emily Pawley, ‘‘Accounting with the Fields: Chemistry and Value in Nutriment in American Agricultural Improvement, 1835–1860,’’ Science as Culture 19
(Dec. 2010), 461–82; Paul Lucier, ‘‘The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth–Century America,’’ Isis 100 (Dec. 2009), 699–732; Ann Johnson, ‘‘Material Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early American
Republic,’’ Osiris 24 (2009), 53–74; Dan Bouk, ‘‘The Science of Difference:
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The history of capitalism is unquestionably expansive, and it is difficult to say what exactly it excludes. As a Russianist colleague quipped
upon reading a job advertisement for a historian of American capitalism,
‘‘This is a tautology, tantamount to a search for an historian of Soviet
socialism!’’ The history of capitalism need not structure a new synthesis
for the entirety of the American past, nor should scholars in other subfields fear its imperial reach. Early republic specialists can remain confident in that era’s importance to capitalism’s history, even as the newer
scholarship suggests that the chronological frame needs to extend earlier
than the American Revolution and beyond the Civil War. As a provocation to come at familiar and seemingly timeless phenomena with fresh
eyes, the history of capitalism will not reduce every historical query to a
single one-word answer. ‘‘Capitalism’’ will not suffice as an explanation
for the Lowell mill girls, speculation in ginseng, savings accounts, or
Unitarianism, but any of these things may help explain capitalism. And
that’s the point: Capitalism is proving productive to think with; perhaps
it need not do more. If nothing else, it provides historians the opportunity to reclaim the economic past, a huge swatch of human experience
far too important to leave to the economists.
Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry,
1830–1930,’’ Enterprise & Society 12 (Dec. 2011), 717–31; Alain Pottage, ‘‘Law
Machines: Scale Models, Forensic Materiality and the Making of Modern Patent
Law,’’ Social Studies of Science 41 (Oct. 2011), 621–43; Kara W. Swanson,
‘‘Authoring an Invention: Patent Production in the Nineteenth-Century United
States’’ in Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in
Legal and Cultural Perspective, ed. Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee (Chicago, 2011), 41–54; Daniel J. Kelves, ‘‘New Blood, New Fruits: Protections for Breeders and Originators, 1789–1930,’’ in ibid., 253–67; Rebecca
J. H. Woods, ‘‘The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British
Empire, 1800–1900,’’ PhD diss., MIT, 2013; Courtney Fullilove, ‘‘The Archive
of Useful Knowledge,’’ PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009; Rood, ‘‘Plantation
Technocrats’’; David Roth Singerman, ‘‘Fraud, Suspicion, and Control in the
Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Sugar Trade’’ (paper presented at Beyond Sweetness:
New Histories of Sugar in the Atlantic World conference, John Carter Brown
Library, Providence, RI, Oct. 25, 2013); Jamie L. Pietruska, ‘‘Propheteering: A
Cultural History of Prediction in the Gilded Age,’’ PhD diss., MIT, 2009; Lukas
Benjamin Rieppel, ‘‘Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science,’’ PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012.
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