Draper GA-3005: American Capitalism in Global
Historical Perspective
New York University
John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought
Spring 2015
Instructor: Justin F. Jackson, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Global History
Location: 14 Univ. Place, Map Room
Schedule: Tuesdays 6:20-8:20
Office: 109, Draper, 14 University Place
Office Hours: Tuesdays 3-5:30 pm; by appointment
Phone: (212) 998-8891
Email: jj98@nyu.edu
Course Description: A force that constantly revolutionizes everything in its path, capitalism
since its early-modern origins has arguably always been a world phenomenon. This seminar
introduces students to an emerging field in the historical discipline typically limited to the United
States, the “history of capitalism,” by reviewing classic works of political economy and
historical scholarship that invites and perhaps even compels us to examine capitalism’s
development in North America and the United States in an international and global frame. This
course’s aim is to challenge students to historicize and de-naturalize capitalism by dethroning it
as a timeless, agentless, and universal social order, as it is so often represented in dominant
American discourse. Instead it approaches capitalism as a changing form of rule conceived, and
to a certain degree crafted and controlled, by individuals and institutions in the past by situating
it in particular world-historical times and spaces within and beyond the United States.
Partly by reading classic works in economics and political economy from Adam Smith
and Karl Marx to Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty, we will confront theoretical and conceptual
questions that transnational, international and global historical scholarship will help us answer
empirically, such as: What is capitalism? An economics of production, trade, and investment? A
social system? A culture, ethic, or way of life? What has been capitalism’s relationship to the
state over time? To the family and gender? To systems of racial subordination? Does capitalism
produce equality or inequality? Readings organized topically and sometimes prefaced by Joyce
Appleby’s world history of capitalism, The Relentless Revolution, will help us historicize these
questions in global terms. Readings explore the origins of capitalism in the world and North
America in primitive accumulation and international trade; how the revolutionary American
generation tried to square the circle between republicanism and commercial capitalism; the
relationship between industrial capitalism in Europe and slavery’s expansion in the United
States; the international and transnational dynamics of industrialization in one American
borderlands region; the global migration of scientific capitalism and mass production methods
and technologies; the international development of social politics and policy networks, economic
ideologies, and the welfare state as a response to global capitalist crisis; how capitalism and the
Cold War structured each other; capital flight and labor migration; and the global ascendancy of
finance and the new merchant capital.
Course Goals and Evaluation: This course is designed both to introduce graduate students to a
new historiography loosely identified as “the history of capitalism” and some of the classic
works of political economy that inform its development, while also improving students’
academic skills, particularly in historiography. Discussion, readings, and writing assignments are
meant to foster students’ intellectual development by encouraging inquiry, debate, and analysis.
Final evaluation of student work will be based on the extent to which students demonstrate
improvement in their ability to comprehend and critique the content of our readings in discussion
and writing assignments over the course of the semester.
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Class Presentation (10%): Each student is required to craft a brief (5-10 minutes)
presentation for one class meeting this semester that summarizes that week’s assigned
readings and posits initial questions for discussion. Students must meet with the
instructor the preceding week to review the readings and prepare their presentation.
Discussion (25%): Students are responsible for reading all required texts assigned for
each week’s class. They also must submit to the course’s NYU Classes website at least
three questions or comments no later than 8 a.m. each Tuesday on which the class meets
(except the class in which they make a presentation). These submissions must transcend
mere description by analyzing the readings in some substantive way: they might identify
and question texts’ assumptions and arguments, empirical evidence, methods, or theories
and concepts and their application. Ideally, these comments and questions should put into
conversation and synthesize the assigned readings, i.e., by comparing their respective
interpretations of a similar historical phenomena through a discussion of their strengths
and weaknesses, etc.
Short Essays (30%-15% each essay): At the beginning of class in Week 4 (February
17), students must submit a brief essay (4-5 pages) responding to one question selected
from a set of questions about the readings and discussion from the first four weeks of
class circulated by the instructor. At the beginning of class in Week 10 (April 7),
students must submit a second short essay of similar length, and of their own design.
Historiography Essay (35%): At the end of the semester, students shall submit a 15-page
essay on a problem in the historiography of American capitalism in a global perspective
which they will develop in consultation with the instructor. Students must assemble a
bibliography of relevant scholarship which they will analyze in their essay and submit to
the instructor before class in Week 11 (April 14). During the next week they must meet
with the instructor, who may or may not revise the bibliography.
Readings and Website: Other than required books available for purchase at the NYU bookstore,
assigned readings, marked in the course schedule by an asterisk (*), will be available on NYU
Classes or accessible through the NYU library’s website. Students should print these documents
and bring them to class in the event that passages from assigned texts are cited during discussion.
Students may use recommended readings to foster their participation in discussion and as a
platform for beginning research for their final essay. Students are also welcome, although not
required, to respond to other students’ questions or comments for discussion on NYU Classes.
Email: Students should not necessarily expect a response within 24 hours if communicating by
email. In other words, if you have an urgent question that must be answered before a class
meeting, please email no later than Mondays at 6 p.m. to guarantee a timely reply.
REQUIRED BOOKS (available at NYU Bookstore):
Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2010)
Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (UNC Press,
1980)
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press, 2013)
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (Random House, 2014)
Cyrus Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America’s Rise to Global
Power (Columbia University Press, 2002)
Course Schedule
PART I: INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM
AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
January 27/Week One: Introduction to the History of American Capitalism in a
Global Perspective
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 3-86 (Chapters 1-3: “The Puzzle of Capitalism”; “Trading in
New Directions”; “Crucial Developments in the Countryside”).
*Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World is America?: The History of the
United States in the Global Age,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a
Global Age (2002), pp. 63-99.
*Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds.,
American History Now (2011), pp. 314-35.
RECOMMENDED:
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century (1994)
Beckert, Sven, et al. “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History
(Sept. 2014), 503-536.
Bender, Thomas. A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006)
Gunder Frank, Andre. World Accumulation, 1492-1789 (1978)
Sklansky, Jeffrey. “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,”
Modern Intellectual History 9:1 (April 2012), 233-248.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System. vols. 1-4
Woods, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002)
February 3/Week Two: Introduction to Political Economy I
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 87-199 (chapters 4-6: “Commentary on Markets and Human
Nature”; “The Two Faces of Eighteenth-Century Capitalism”; “The Ascent of Germany and the
United States”).
*Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Bantam Classic, 2003; Modern Library Edition), pp. 3-16.
*Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Electric Book Co., 2001), pp. 61-82.
*Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, with an
Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (Verso, 2012), pp. 31-62.
RECOMMENDED:
Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. 2 vols.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before
its Triumph (Princeton, 2003).
Marx, Karl. Capital. 3 vols.
Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret
History of Primitive Accumulation (2000).
February 10/Week Three: Introduction to Political Economy II
*Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.
1-50.
*Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Great Political and Economic Origins of Our
Times (Boston: Beacon, 2001), pp. 257-68 (“Freedom in a Complex Society”).
*Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago, 2002), pp. 7-55 (Chapters
1-3: “The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom,” “The Role of
Government in a Free Society,” “The Control of Money”).
*David Harvey, “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian
Theory,” in David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography (2012), 237-266.
RECOMMENDED:
Block, Fred L. The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polyani’s Critique (2014)
Cohen, Jere. Protestantism and Capitalism: The Mechanisms of Influence (2002)
Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2009)
Ghosh, Peter. Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (2014)
Harvey, David. Limits to Capital (1982)
Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom (1944)
Keynes, John Maynard. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1997 ed.)
PART II: AMERICAN CAPITALISM IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
February 17/Week Four: Capitalism and Political Economy in the Early Republic:
National and International Contexts
FIRST BRIEF ESSAY DUE
McCoy, The Elusive Republic, all.
*Gordon Wood, “The Enemy is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Journal of
the Early Republic 16:2 (Summer 1996), 293-308.
RECOMMENDED:
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: the Republican Vision of the 1790s (1984)
Holton, Woody. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007)
Kulikoff, Allan. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000)
Matson, Cathy D., and Peter S. Onuf. A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in
Revolutionary America (1990)
Shankman, Andrew. Crucible of Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and
Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (2004)
Taylor, Alan. Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine
Frontier, 1760-1820 (1990)
Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993)
Feb. 24/Week Five: Slavery, Race, and Capitalism in U.S. Continental Expansion
*Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The
Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives & New Directions (2006), pp. 335-361.
Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, pp. 1-45, 244-420.
RECOMMENDED:
Baptiste, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism (2014)
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
May, Robert. Slavery, Race and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of
Latin America (2013)
Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)
Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009)
Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991)
Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development (2006)
Zakim, Michael, ed. Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth
Century America (2012); Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the
Early Republic (2003)
March 3/Week Six: War, Cotton, and Capitalism in the Remaking of America and the
World over the Long 19th Century: Comparative, Transnational, and Global
Perspectives
*Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, pp. 8-38 (“The Anatomy of
Emancipation”).
*Andrew Zimmerman, “Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa,”
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol 10, no. 4 (October 2010), pp. 454-63.
Beckert, Empire of Cotton, pp. ix-xxii, 199-378.
RECOMMENDED:
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (2014)
Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of
Emancipation (1977)
Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the PostCivil War North, 1865-1901 (2001); West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of
America after the Civil War (2007)
Roediger, David. Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (2014)
Sklansky, Jeffrey. The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought,
1820-1920 (2002)
Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War
(1986)
March 10/Week Seven: The Global Gilded Age in the Remaking of the North
American West: A Regional/Borderlands History of American Capitalism
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 200-227 (Chapter 7: “The Industrial Leviathans and their
Opponents”).
*Eric Rauchway, “Globalization and America,” in Blessed Among Nations: How the World
Made America (2006), pp. 7-29.
*Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011),
pp. 140-178 (Chapter 4: “Spatial Politics”).
*Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
(2006), 55-177.
RECOMMENDED:
Bensel, Richard F. The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (2000)
Fink, Leon. The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order
(2014)
Lamoreaux, Naomi. The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 (1985)
Montoya, Maria. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict Over Land in
the American West, 1840-1900 (2005)
Needham, Andrew. Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (2014)
Sanders, E. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (1999)
Sklar, Martin. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (1988)
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (2011): idem, “Its Your Misfortune, and None of My Own”: A History of the
American West (1991)
March 24/Week Eight: A Scientific American Capitalism Abroad
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 228-264 (Chapter 8: Rulers as Capitalists).
*Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (2010),
all (skim).
David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of
Labor in U.S. History (2012), 98-135 (Chapter 4: “Crossing Borders: Racial Knowledge and the
Transnational Triumphs of U.S. Management”).
*Gregg Mitman and Paul Erickson, “Latex and Blood: Science, Markets, and American Empire,”
Radical History Review, no 107 (Spring 2010), 45-73.
RECOMMENDED:
Bender, Daniel. American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (2009)
Colby, Jason M. The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central
America (2011)
Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009)
Hawkins, Michael C. Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the
Philippines’ Muslim South (2013)
McGuiness, Aims. Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (2008)
Poblete, Joanna. Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai’i (2014)
Salman, Michael. The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism
in the American Colonial Philippines (2001)
March 31/Week Nine: Dollars, Diplomacy, and U.S. Economic Empire in the
American Century
*Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar
Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (1999), pp. 4-30 (Chapter 1: “Gold Standard Visions: International
Currency Reformers, 1898-1905”).
Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism, 1-161.
*Noel Maurer, The Empire Trap: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Intervention to Protect American
Property Overseas, 1893-2013 (2013), pp. 1-24, 89-147 (Introduction and “Chapter 4: “The Trap
Closes”).
RECOMMENDED:
Frieden, Jeffrey. “The Economics of Intervention: American Overseas Investments and
Relations with Underdeveloped Areas, 1890-1950,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 31:1 (1989), 55-80.
Lumba, Allan E.S. “Imperial Standards: Colonial Currencies, Racial Capacities, and Economic
Knowledge during the Philippine-American War,” Diplomatic History (2014)
Ninkovich, Frank. The Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power (2014)
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982)
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1972)
April 7/Week Ten: American Capitalism in Global Depression, War, and
Modernization: Transnational and International Policy Networks
SECOND BRIEF ESSAY DUE
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 265-287 (chapter 9: “War and Depression”).
*Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), pp. 409-484
(Chapter 10: “New Deal”).
*Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (2012),
pp. 1-54 (Introduction: “The End of Laissez-Faire”; Chapter 1: “Market Advocacy in a Time of
Crisis”).
*David Ekbladh, “Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority
as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933-1945,” International History Review 32
(March 2010), 47-67.
RECOMMENDED:
Amadae, S.M. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice
Liberalism (2003)
Eklbadh, David. The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an
American World Order (2010)
Immerwahr, Daniel. Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
(2015)
O’Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in TwentiethCentury U.S. History (2001)
Philipps-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New
Deal to Reagan (2009)
April 14/Week Eleven: Cold War Capitalism in the U.S., Europe, and Beyond
FINAL ESSAY BIBLIOGRAPHY AND PROPOSAL DUE
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 288-330 (“A New Level of Prosperity”).
*Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International
Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization, vol. 31, no. 4 (Autumn 1977),
607-633.
*Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe
(2006), pp. 1-14 (Introduction), 336-375 (“The Consumer-Citizen: How Europeans Traded
Rights for Goods”).
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Times (2007), pp. 110- 157 (Chapter 4: “Creating the Third World: the United States Confronts
Revolution”).
RECOMMENDED:
Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western
Europe, 1947-1952. (1987)
Hoganson, Kristin. Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity,
1865-1920 (2007)
Lundestad, Geir. “Empire by Invitation?: The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952,”
Journal of Peace Research 23:3 (1986), 263-277.
Maier, Charles S. In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (1987);
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (2006)
April 21/Week Twelve: The Global End of the Golden Age: Capital Flight and
Finance Capital
Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (2001), pp. 41-201.
*Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (W.W. Norton,
2006), pp. 363-391 (Chapter 6: “Crisis and Change”).
Judith Stein, “Politics and Policies in the 1970s and Early Twenty-First Century: The Linked
Recessions,” in Leon Fink and Joan Sangster, eds., Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of
Economic Crises (2014), pp. 141-160.
RECOMMENDED:
Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010)
-and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in
American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008), 1-32.
Borstellman, Thomas. The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic
Inequality (2012)
Ferguson, Niall, ed. The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (2010)
Friedman, Tami. Communities in Competition: Capital Migration and Plant Relocation in the
U.S. Carpet Industry, 1929-1975 (2001)
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity (1990)
Rodgers, Daniel. Age of Fracture (2011)
Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the
Seventies (2011)
April 28/Week Thirteen: The Rise of Retail and the New Merchant Capitalism
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 331-399 (Chapter 11: “Capitalism in New Settings”).
*Nelson Lichtenstein, “Supply Chains, Workers’ Chains, and the New World of Retail
Supremacy,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 4:1 (2007).
*Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism,” International Labor and WorkingClass History no. 81 (Spring 2012), 8-27.
RECOMMENDED:
Hamilton, Shane. Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (2008)
Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of
Business (2010); ed., Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (2006)
Moreton, B. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009)
May 5: Week Fourteen: The United States and the New Global Gilded Age?
Appleby, Relentless Revolution, pp. 400-436 (Chapters 12 & 13: “Into the Twenty First
Century,” “Of Crisis and Critics”).
*Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, skim, particularly pp. 237-467.
May 19: Final Essay Due