seth rockman - what makes the history of capitalism newsworthy

:KDW0DNHVWKH+LVWRU\RI&DSLWDOLVP1HZVZRUWK\"Seth Rockman

Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp.439-466 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI3HQQV\OYDQLD3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/jer.2014.0043

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Emory University Libraries (2 Sep 2014 17:25 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jer/summary/v034/34.3.rockman.html

Review EssayWhat Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?

S E T H R O C K M A N

Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America. Edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith.(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. viii 358. Cloth,$97.00; paper $32.00.)

Capitalism may be in crisis as an economic system, but it is thriving as asubject within the historical profession. The history of capitalism noworganizes a book series at Columbia University Press, a seminar programat the Newberry Library, a MOOC at Cornell University, a graduatefield at University of Georgia, and a tenure line at Brown University.Undergraduate courses on American capitalism are filling lecture hallsat Princeton, Florida, and Loyola University Chicago, while the NewSchool for Social Research has launched its new Heilbroner Center forCapitalism Studies. The topic has provided thematic unity to recentannual meetings of the Social Science History Association and the Orga-nization of American Historians. In the American Historical Associa-tions state-of-the-field volume American History Now, the history ofcapitalism stands alongside established subfields like womens historyand cultural history. A front-page article last year in the New York Timescarried the headline, In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar.1

Seth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He thanksJulia Ott, Lukas Rieppel, Sandy Zipp, and JER editor David Waldstreicher forhelpful advice with this essay.

1. Jennifer Schuessler, In History Class, Capitalism Sees Its Stock Soar, NewYork Times, Apr. 7, 2013, A1; Sven Beckert, History of American Capitalism,in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011),31435. In addition to the Beckert overview, other recent assessments of the field

PAGE 439

Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Fall 2014)Copyright 2014 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.

................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:43 PS

440 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)

This is news? one could hear many early republic historians askwith incredulity. The study of capitalism has long been a central concernof our field. Forty years ago, the new labor history began recoveringthe experiences of the first generation of American wage laborers in com-munities like Paterson, Rockdale, and Lowell. Very soon, artisans ofevery trade had a historian to recount their declining economic power inthe face of capitalisms rise. Graduate students in the 1980s cut theirteeth on farmers account books and rural mentalites, and few qualifyingexam lists lacked a section on the transition to capitalism debate. Thegeneration coming of age in the 1990s had the market revolutionlooming over its head, and in the wake of a Journal of the Early Republicspecial issue on capitalism in 1996, social historians continued to arguewith Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby over the compatibility of capital-ism and democracy. Over the last decade, SHEAR conferences havefeatured sessions on capitalism as a force of liberation or destruction, asa top-down or bottom-up phenomenon, and as ideology or a structure.As often as not, experienced commentators have alerted youngerpresenters to the classic works of Samuel Rezneck, Oscar and MaryHandlin, or George Rogers Taylor, extending the fields historiographi-cal genealogy ever deeper into the past. If academic generations definethemselves against their immediate predecessors, how many revisionist

include Jeffrey Sklansky, The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and SocialHistories of Capitalism, Modern Intellectual History 9 (Apr. 2012), 23348;Sklansky, Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11 (Spring 2014), 2346;Kenneth Lipartito, Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business His-tory, Enterprise & Society 14 (Dec. 2013), 686704; Louis Hyman, Why Writethe History of Capitalism? Symposium Magazine, July 8, 2013, http://www.symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman; NoamMaggor et al., Teaching the History of Capitalism, http://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/node/132. In addition to providing themes for national meetings, thehistory of capitalism has organized a number of recent conferences: CalculatingCapitalism, Columbia University, Apr. 2526, 2014; Histories of AmericanCapitalism, Cornell University, Nov. 68, 2014; Capitalizing on Finance: NewDirections in the History of Capitalism, Huntington Library, Apr. 1213, 2013;Capitalism in America: A New History, University of Georgia, Feb. 18, 2012;The New History of American Capitalism, Harvard University, Nov. 1819,2011; Power and the History of Capitalism, New School of Social Research,Apr. 1516, 2011; Slaverys Capitalism: A New History of American EconomicDevelopment, Brown University and Harvard University, Apr. 79, 2011.

PAGE 440................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:44 PS

Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 441

historians have humbly discovered that their scholarly grandparents hadin fact been exploring the same questions half a lifetime earlier? Thisnew 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 capitalismand I count myself in these ranksmake no pretense of having discov-ered a new field. Many historians working under this rubric are quickto credit their undergraduate teachers and graduate advisors: Eliza-beth Blackmar, Barbara Fields, and Eric Foner at Columbia, or Jean-Christophe Agnew and Michael Denning at Yale, to name only twoclusters of influential faculty who have been talking about capitalism fordecades. For those interested in parlor games, younger historians of capi-talism can reach Agnew or Blackmar in about half the steps required toget to Kevin Bacon. Columbia- and Yale-trained students have been atthe forefront of institutionalizing the history of capitalism elsewhere;none with more success than Sven Beckert, whose Program on the Studyof Capitalism at Harvard has placed recent graduates into faculty posi-tions at University of North CarolinaChapel Hill, UCBerkeley, CornellUniversity, and University of Pennsylvania. Yet, not all roads lead backto Cambridge, let alone New Haven and Morningside Heights, with thefields institutional genealogy looking less like a family tree than an over-grown forest of departments, centers, and programs. Consider the rangeof affiliations of doctoral students receiving funding from the LibraryCompany of Philadelphias Program in Early American Economy andSociety or appearing on now-ubiquitous history-of-capitalism conferencepanels. Complicating matters further, many of the dissertations (recentand underway) in the field are directed by faculty members who do notidentify themselves primarily as historians of capitalism; take, for exam-ple, William Cronon and Thomas Sugrue, two graduate mentors betteridentified with the respective subfields of environmental and urban his-tory. But even doctoral advisors coming to history of capitalism throughthe more predicable routes of labor and business historyNelsonLichtenstein and Colleen Dunlavy, for instancewould offer idiosyn-cratic accounts of the fields origins. Sven Beckert might highlight theimportance of Europeanists like Eric Hobsbawm, William H. Sewell, Jr.,and E. P. Thompson in shaping a field that nonetheless maintains adistinctive Americanist lineage. One imagines Richard John making acompelling case for Alfred Chandler as history of capitalisms progenitor,while the New Labor history of Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery

PAGE 441................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:45 PS


would feature prominently for Jefferson Cowie, Rosemary Feurer, andScott Reynolds Nelson. William J. Novak, Robin Einhorn, and BrianBalogh might credit American Political Development (a move in 1980sand 1990s political science and sociology toward the history of in-stitutions) with redirecting historians gaze toward the states role in theeconomy. A dozen other historiographies might appear in competingaccounts of the fields genealogy. Suffice it to say, the contours of thefield stretch beyond just a handful of programs and advisors.

What makes the history of capitalism newsworthy is less institutionalthan intellectual, as the field has opened new vistas on the past by pursu-ing its questions differently from an earlier scholarship. First, the currentscholarship has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition ofcapitalism. Few works in the field begin with an explicit statement ofwhat the author means by capitalism. If the goal is to figure out whatcapitalism is and how it has operated historically, scholars seem willingto let capitalism float as a placeholder while they look for ground-levelevidence of a system in operation. The empirical work of discovery takesprecedence over the application of theoretical categories: A question likeWhat might mens grooming products or Congressional tariff debatestell us about capitalism? organizes the inquiry, not What does capital-ism tell us about razors and rate schedules? Recent work shows littleinterest in demarcating certain economic activities or actors as pre-capitalist or proto-capitalist relative to a predetermined standard of actualcapitalism. By extension, transitions are not an overarching preoccu-pation of the recent scholarship, with less attention given to the timingof a market revolution, shifts between modes of production, or thecontrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. As the turmoil of thecurrent global economy has revealed a system wildly inconsistent withtheorized accounts of pure capitalismit isnt like the state has becomeless relevant to the economy today than it was in 1750 or that free mar-kets have ended human traffickinghistorians have shown greater com-fort with the ambiguities of early America capitalism. Once-essentialboundaries, as between mercantilism and capitalism, diminish in impor-tance as scholars recognize the states geopolitical interest in organizingmarkets and generating revenue up through the present day. Likewise,the space between moral economy and market economy appears lessobvious as historians assert that culture (implicit in traditionalism of theformer) also governs the latter despite its presumed profit-maximizingrationality. The new scholarship embraces the varieties of capitalism,

PAGE 442................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:46 PS


to use the title of an influential volume in political science on the mutabil-ity 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 longclaimed capitalisms story, or at least its rise, as their own. After all, oursis the era of the Erie Canal, de-skilled artisans, and trans-Atlantic radi-cals, plus three major panics and a bank war!3

Stealing some of our thunder, the history of capitalism tends to situatethe early United States in the sweep of an early modern global historydefined by commercial integration, the fiscalmilitary state, and the valo-rization of instrumental knowledge. For example, commodity studies likeJennifer Andersons Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early Americaand Sven Beckerts Empire of Cotton: A Global History dexterouslybridge the eras of colonization and industrialization. Other scholars havesimilarly deepened the fields chronological range: Recent syntheses byJoyce Appleby and Christopher Tomlins span more than three centu-ries.4

The more specialized scholarship on U.S. capitalism rarely confinesitself to the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Jonathan Levys Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalismand Risk in America begins with the 1841 Creole slave revolt and endsin the Progressive Era. Scott Reynolds Nelsons A Nation of Deadbeats:

2. Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The InstitutionalFoundations of Comparative Advantage (New York, 2001). For commentary, see Varieties of Capitalism Roundtable, Business History Review 84 (Winter2010), 63774; Richard Deeg and Gregory Jackson, Towards a More DynamicTheory of Capitalist Variety, SocioEconomic Review 5 (Jan. 2007), 14979.

3. For the best recent overview, see John L. Larson, The Market Revolution inAmerica: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (New York,2010). Some of the early republics claims on capitalism were articulated in AlfredF. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History ofAmerican Radicalism (DeKalb, IL, 1993); and especially Michael Merrill, PuttingCapitalism in its Place: A Review of Recent Literature, William and MaryQuarterly 52 (Apr. 1995), 31526.

4. Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cam-bridge, MA, 2012); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York,2014); Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (NewYork, 2010); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Iden-tity in Colonizing English America, 15801865 (New York, 2010).

PAGE 443................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:46 PS


An Uncommon History of Americas Financial Disasters starts withWilliam Duer in debtors prison in 1792 and concludes during the NewDeal. Paul Luciers excellent book on scientific entrepreneurs and theenergy industry runs from 1820 to 1890, Caroline Fisks award-winninghistory of intellectual property travels from 1800 to 1930, and two recentdissertations on accounting (17501880) and actuarial science (18301930) boast chronologies that defy the neat bookends of the early repub-lic. Indeed, neither the American Revolution nor the Civil War plays adeterminative role in these narratives, marking a departure from an ear-lier historiography depicting capitalism as the consequence of the formerand the cause of the latter.5

Third, consistent with its disavowal of theoretical definitions andrecalibrated chronologies that span the Civil War, the new scholarshiprecognizes slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism. Ofcourse, slavery has long been central to debates over British capitalism,beginning with the 1944 publication of Eric Williamss Capitalism andSlavery. Although the United States also had an industrial revolutionreliant upon slave-grown cotton, the American historiography had gener-ally considered slavery as a bounded regional economy, marking theSouth as a laggard, rather than a leader, in national economic develop-ment.6

A wave of new scholarship, however, has positioned southern slave-holders as architects of a capitalist system predicated on commodity

5. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism andRisk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation ofDeadbeats: An Uncommon History of Americas Financial Disasters (New York,2012); Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil inAmerica, 18201890 (Baltimore, 2008); Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge:Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 18001930(Chapel Hill, NC, 2009); Caitlin C. Rosenthal, From Memory to Mastery:Accounting for Control in America, 17501880, PhD diss., Harvard University,2012; Daniel B. Bouk, The Science of Difference: Developing Tools of Dis-crimination in the American Life Insurance Industry, 18301930, 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 Interna-tional Trade and Economic Development (New York, 2002). On the absence ofslavery in American economic history, see Seth Rockman, The Unfree Originsof American Capitalism, in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspec-tives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, PA, 2006), 33561.

PAGE 444................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:47 PS


production, entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and lengthychains of trans-Atlantic finance. The framework of Second Slaveryhighlighting slaverys nineteenth-century regeneration in Brazil, Cuba,and the U.S. under modern regimes of industrial managementhasproven especially productive. By dislodging wage labor as the sine quanon of capitalism, historians of capitalism are able to consider laborexploitation in a wider range of contexts, and especially to appreciate theinterdependence of plantation agriculture and factory production. Slav-ery also functioned as property regime in which, to quote one scholar,slaves were worked financially as well as physically to store and trans-fer wealth, to access credit, and to stabilize an under-regulated system ofpaper money. Relative to other subfields of U.S. history, the history ofcapitalism may be the place where slavery assumes the most central posi-tion within the larger national narrative.7

Fourth, the new scholarship on capitalism integrates a variety of sub-fields and methodologies under one capacious heading. If nothing else,the study of capitalism has woven together business history, labor his-tory, economic history, political economy, and the history of economic

7. Bonnie Martin, Slaverys Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,Journal of Southern History 76 (Nov. 2010), 81766, quote on 866. Exemplaryrecent work includes Caitlin C. Rosenthal, From Memory to Mastery: Account-ing for Control in America, 17501880, Enterprise & Society 14 (Dec. 2013),73248; Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capital-ism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2012); Michael OMalley,Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America (Chicago,2012), esp. 4482; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empirein the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), esp. 25254. One theoreticaltouchstone is Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, andthe Philosophy of History (Durham, NC, 2005). For Second Slavery, see DaleW. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy(Lanham, MD, 2004); Anthony E. Kaye, The Second Slavery: Modernity in theNineteenthCentury South and the Atlantic World, Journal of Southern History75 (Aug. 2009), 62750; Daniel Rood, Plantation Technocrats: A Social Historyof Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 18301860, PhD diss., Uni-versity of CaliforniaIrvine, 2010; David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, TheProduction of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (NewYork, 2012), 1963. For an overview of this historiography, see Seth Rockman,Slavery and Capitalism, Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (Mar. 2012), 5, andonline supplement at http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies/the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies-slavery-and-capitalism/.

PAGE 445................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:48 PS


thought, and in doing so, has sought to revitalize subfields that (to put itpolitely) had fallen out of favor in the profession. Many un-cool topicstariffs, infrastructure, marine insuranceare now hot. But the redemp-tion of these subjects is neither a rear-guard action, nor a repudiation ofthe last thirty years of social and cultural history. To the contrary, thehistory of capitalism has shown such strength precisely for its embraceof critical theory and the experiences of workers, consumers, and entre-preneurs removed from the seats of power. For the early republic, justconsider well-received books like Scott Sandages Born Losers: A Historyof Failure in America, Stephen Mihms Nation of Counterfeiters: Capi-talists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, Jane KamenskysThe Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and AmericasFirst Banking Collapse, and Brian Luskeys On the Make: Clerks and theQuest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. Rosanne Currarinohas recently identified the early republic as the most fertile site of a newhistory of cultural economy, by which she means the re-appropriationof the economic past by scholars willing to interrogate the economicas a cultural and linguistic construction. Evaluating cultural history moregenerally, James W. Cook foregrounds the history of capitalism for itsinnovative melding of signs and structures. As if to convey the blend-ing of disparate methodologies, Cornells Louis Hyman has offeredFoucault 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 ofpolitical thought. Scholars working in the field are dubious of the neo-classical orthodoxies that prevail in Economics departments, especiallypresumptions of utility-maximizing humans and self-regulating marketsinexorably moving towards equilibrium. Many of the fundamentals of

8. Rosanne Currarino, Toward a History of Cultural Economy, Journal ofthe Civil War Era 2 (Dec. 2012), 56485; James W. Cook, The Kids Are Alright:On the Turning of Cultural History, American Historical Review 117 (June2012), 74671; Hyman as quoted in New York Times, Apr. 7, 2013. On culturalhistory as a methodology for the economic past, start with the Journal of CulturalEconomy, especially its Fictions of Finance special issue, 6 (2013). See also PerH. Hansen, Business History: A Cultural and Narrative Approach, BusinessHistory Review 86 (Winter 2012), 693717; and two canonical articles: TimothyMitchell, Fixing the Economy, Cultural Studies 12 (Jan. 1998), 82101; andSusan Buck-Morss, Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display, CriticalInquiry 21 (Winter 1995), 43467.

PAGE 446................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:49 PS


Marxism appear equally teleological, especially a stadial theory of historythat predetermines capitalisms rise and fall. To be sure, a focus on thecommodity and the presumption of a relationship between market,state, and society betray the fields debt to Marx, but recent scholarshiphas shied away from Marxist terminology; half-jokingly, one might callthe field Marxish since its commitment to that tradition often begins andends with the project of demystifying capitalism. At the most basic level,the fields intervention is to de-naturalize capitalism, to provide the his-tory of a system that the dominant culture depicts as timeless and irresist-ible, even in the midst of crisis. Whether they take their cues from DavidHarvey, Cedric J. Robinson, or scholars writing under the standard ofsubaltern studies, from the photography of Allan Sekula, or from a spellof post-collegiate employment in management consulting, historians ofcapitalism refuse to give markets a trans-historical agency. The mar-ket is a euphemism for actual economic actors (people) and institutions(law and culture) that shape how economic power is exerted and experi-enced. Indeed, state power is never far from the surface, with attentionparticularly focused on the role of law in setting the rules under whicheconomic activity takes place; for that reason, history of capitalism andpolitical economy often appear as synonymous in calls-for-papers andjob listings.

The history of capitalism might be thought of as comparable to Sci-ence Studies (or STS), an enterprise that similarly seeks to de-naturalizeprocesses that appear inevitable under the heading of progress. Bothundertakings interrogate their very subjectsscience, capitalismas con-tested terrain on which claims to authority and social power are madeand exercised. Presuming nothing to be inevitable, historians of capital-ism and STS scholars embed what they study in a matrix of social rela-tions, cultural practices, and institutional arrangements operating underspecific, yet always contingent, historical circumstances. The recentfinancial crisis promoted cross-fertilization between the fields, as scholarsin the sociology, philosophy, and history of science like Donald Mac-Kenzie and Philip Mirowski have interrogated economics, capitalismslegitimating discourse, as a form of knowledge production complicit increating the phenomena it purports to describe.9

9. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models ShapeMarkets (Cambridge, MA, 2006); MacKenzie, Material Markets: How EconomicAgents Are Constructed (New York, 2009); MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and LuciaSiu, eds., Do Economists Shape Markets? On the Performativity of Economics

PAGE 447................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:49 PS


Akin to historians of science who consider patronage, laboratoryspace, and the prevailing political climate as essential to new discoveriesin chemistry or physics, historians of capitalism have also been drawn toquestions of infrastructureless in the literal sense of the roads and wiresfacilitating commerce and more in the sense of the submerged architec-turematerial, legal, and ideologicalthat makes a highway system ortelecommunication network plausible in the first place. Like the popularDavid Macaulay books that rip the skin off a skyscraper or the wallsoff a castle, the current scholarship presumes that behind something assimple as a dollar bill or a phone bill theres an entire universe waitingto be revealed. With an eye toward technology in the broadest sense ofthe word, the fields governing questions are more likely How does itwork? than What does it mean?

Other commentators might stress a different set of scholarly moves atthe heart of the new history of capitalism. It is certainly in dialogue withefforts to revitalize business history and labor history, projects clearlyarticulated by the editors of leading journals in both fields. Walter A.Friedman and Geoffrey Jones re-launched Business History Review in2010 with a call for ambitious, multidisciplinary work in dialogue withinterlocutors other than the ghost of Alfred Chandler. On the pages ofLabor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Leon Fink con-nected the robustness of the field to a newfound willingness to engagethe surrounding political economy of state and business enterprise. Itwill not suffice to pin workers struggles on the abstraction of capital-CCapital, nor on a set of caricatured plutocrats resembling Mr. Burns fromThe Simpsons; the best work in the field understands factory owners,shop-floor supervisors, and anti-labor politicians as multifaceted actorsoperating 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 Natures Economics(New York, 1991). See also Mary S. Morgan, The World in the Model: How Econo-mists Work and Think (New York, 2012); Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg,eds., Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and TechnologyStudies (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Eco-nomics (Chicago, 2005).

10. Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones, Business History: Time forDebate, Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011), 18. For a similar exhorta-tion, see the Forum on Method and Concept in Business History, Enterprise &Society 14 (Sept. 2013), 435510, especially Christine Meisner Rosen, What Is

PAGE 448................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:50 PS


The history of capitalism is also clearly in conversation with the NewInstitutional Economics. Both stress the socially constructed constraintsthat organize production, distribution, and consumption; but whileeconomists like Paul A. David or Douglass C. North would credit formaland informal institutions with reducing transactional uncertainty, histori-ans of capitalism would implicate law and culture in the unequal pros-pects and liabilities that disparate actors carry into the marketplace.11

Finally, capitalisms history is an urgent concern for some legal schol-ars and political scientists, especially those working under the auspicesof International Political Economy (IPE). Disputing economists claimsthat markets summon money into being as an arbitrary marker of valueto facilitate exchange, scholars like Christine Desan argue that currencyis a product of public governance and an expression of political authoritythat shapes what is understood as the market in a given society andhow it functions.12

A decade ago, readers of the Journal of the Early Republic previewedsome features of the history of capitalism in a special issue entitled,Whither the Early Republic? There, James L. Huston anticipated thatgovernance and attention to the actual functioning of the marketplacewould increasingly organize scholarship under the capacious label ofpolitical economy.13

Business History? 47585. For labor history, see Leon Fink, The Great Escape:How a Field Survived Hard Times, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History ofthe Americas 8 (Spring 2011), 10915 (quote on 112).

11. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(Winter 1991), 97112; Paul A. David, Why Are Institutions the Carriers ofHistory?: Path Dependence and the Evolution of Conventions, Organizations,and Institutions, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 5 (1994), 20520.

12. Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capi-talism (New York, forthcoming); Desan, The Market as a Matter of Money:Denaturalizing Economic Currency in American Constitutional History, Lawand Social Inquiry 30 (Winter 2005), 160; Desan and many others are featuredin Money Matters: The Law, Economics, and Politics of Currency, special issueof Theoretical Inquiries in Law 11 (Jan. 2010). Historically oriented works inInternational 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 TwentiethCentury (New York, 2002).

13. James L. Huston, Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered: The EarlyRepublic and Historians Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy, Journal ofthe Early Republic 24 (Summer 2004), 21931 (quote on 221). For an excellent

PAGE 449................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:50 PS


In the same volume, David Waldstreicher, Amy Dru Stanley,Stephanie Smallwood, and Walter Johnson planted slavery and its atten-dant ideology of white supremacy squarely at the heart of early republiccapitalism. But more importantly, their essays developed one of thewatchwords of the new history of capitalism: commodification. As Small-wood explained, We know a great deal about commodities and theirfetishization, but commodificationthe process by which things are madeinto commoditiesremains less rigorously interrogated. Accordingly,the history of capitalism must dismantle the black box that obscures thesubstantial work involved in transforming aspects of the material worldinto exchangeable units. Very quickly, commodification directs attentionto the social production of knowledge. Standards for measuring, grading,and pricing, for example, can never be presupposed, but emerge in con-tests over authority and expertise, whether regarding the legitimacy ofany quantitative metric or the legitimacy of the technology deployed inrendering it or representing it. At bottom, commodification is a discur-sive process in which language and the means of its transmissionthinkof an early modern prices current, the legalistic formality of a contract,or a written IOU from the governmentdo the epistemological work ofcreating goods that can be bought, sold, and consumed. These insightsinform much of the new scholarship and help explain the particularinterest in the account book as a bedrock technology of capitalism andin money as a semiotic system.14

testament to political economy, see Richard R. John, guest editor, Ruling Pas-sions: Political Economy in NineteenthCentury America, Journal of PolicyHistory 18, no. 1 (2006), 120. See also Nancy Beadie, Education and the Cre-ation of Capital in the Early American Republic (New York, 2010); LindsaySchakenbach, From Discontented Bostonians to Patriotic Industrialists: TheBoston Associates and the Transcontinental Treaty, 17901825, New EnglandQuarterly 84 (Sept. 2011), 377401; Gautham Rao, The Creation of the Ameri-can State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution, PhDdiss., University of Chicago, 2008; Ariel Ron, Developing the Country: Scien-tific Agriculture and the Roots of the Republican Party, PhD diss., University ofCaliforniaBerkeley, 2012; David H. Schley, Making the Capitalist City: TheB&O Railroad and Urban Space in Baltimore, 18271877, PhD diss., JohnsHopkins University, 2013; Stephen Chambers, The American State of Cuba:The Business of Cuba and U.S. Foreign Policy, 17971825, PhD diss., BrownUniversity, 2013.

14. David Waldstreicher, The Vexed Story of Human Commodification ToldBy Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith, Journal of the Early Republic 24

PAGE 450................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:51 PS


Standing alongside commodification in the scholarship is anotherprocessual noun: financialization. By recovering the vast amount of cul-tural, legal, and technological work involved in making securities mar-kets, scholars have rethought the histories of investment, savings, andrisk. Although the term financialization is often associated with the dom-inance of the financial services industry in the late twentieth century,historians see a transformational moment in Englands early modernFinancial Revolution when sovereign debt proliferated and personaland commercial credit migrated from ledger books into circulatingfinancial instruments that could be assigned, exchanged, repackaged intoinvestment opportunities for third parties, and ultimately disassociatedfrom such material referents as a bushel of grain or plot of land; onescholar has posited credit fetishism as a useful label for this process ofabstraction. The allure of future revenue streams predicated on past actsof money-lending required new temporal horizons, a new mathematicsfor calculating depreciation and probability, and new understandings ofmortality mediated through insurance policies and trusts. The chainsof credit between large investment houses, state-chartered banks, and

(Summer 2004), 26878; Amy Dru Stanley, Wages, Sin, and Slavery: SomeThoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations, ibid., 27988; StephanieSmallwood, Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of AntiSlaveryIdeology in the Early Republic, ibid., 28998 (quote on 291); Walter Johnson,The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question, ibid.,299308. The word commoditization also appears in the literature, as in IgorKopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. ArjunAppadurai (New York, 1986), 6494. On account books, ledgers, and the broaderturn to quantification, see Anthony G. Hopwood and Peter Miller, eds., Account-ing as Social and Institutional Practice (New York, 1994); Peter Miller, Calculat-ing Economic Life, Journal of Cultural Economy 1 (2008), 5164; StephanieSmallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Dias-pora (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 3364; Caitlin Rosenthal, Storybook-Keepers:Narratives and Numbers in Nineteenth-Century America, Commonplace: TheInteractive Journal of Early American Life 12 (Apr. 2012), http://common-pla-ce.org/vol-12/no-03/rosenthal/; Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountabil-ity and the Rise and Fall of Nations (New York, 2014). On money, see Mariekede Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minneapolis, MN,2005), xxv; Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (NewYork, 2006); Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value inEighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008).

PAGE 451................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:52 PS


entrepreneurial borrowers rendered property ownership into a socialfiction, one whose flimsiness was all too often revealed whenever thechain broke. This was especially vivid in the financing of slavery, towhich scholars attribute such macroeconomic crises as the South SeaBubble and the Panic of 1837, as well as the personal tragedies of count-less enslaved families left at the mercy of the auctioneers gavel whenevera planter went bankrupt. By following the moneywhether to a farmersmortgage owned by the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Companyor to an annuity generating income for a London widow based on aminute fractional share of a West Indian plantationhistorians of capital-ism resist investment as a natural economic concept floating abovesocial relations, cultural production, and political economy. The conceptof financialization, like that of commodification, attests to the fields abid-ing interest in de-naturalizing the entire range of goods and services thatmight otherwise be presupposed as inherent to the economy. As proc-esses suggesting the agency of human beings rather than the autonomousoperations of market forces, both terms impel scholars to excavate therelations of power that underlay what can be bought and sold (and bywhom and on what terms) at a given moment in history.15

It would be hard to find a better introduction to the history of capital-ism 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, 16201720 (Cambridge MA, 2011), 230 (forcredit fetishism); William Deringer, Calculated Values: The Politics and Episte-mology of Economic Numbers in Britain, 16881738, PhD diss., Princeton Uni-versity, 2012; Eli Cook, The Pricing of Everyday Life, Raritan 32 (Winter2013), 10921. For the nineteenth century, see Tamara Plakins Thornton, AGreat Machine or a Beast of Prey: A Boston Corporation and Its Rural Debtorsin an Age of Capitalist Transformation, Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Winter2007), 56797; Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, andthe Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York, 2013); NicholasDraper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and BritishSociety at the End of Slavery (New York, 2010). For the twentieth century, theterm is often associated with Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of theAmerican Economy, Socio-Economic Review 3 (May 2005), 173208; LouisHyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ, 2011);Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (NewYork, 2009). More generally, Aaron Carico and Dara Orenstein, The Fictions ofFinance, Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014), 313; David Graeber, Debt:The First 5,000 Years (New York, 2011).

PAGE 452................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:53 PS


Gary J. Kornblith. The volume reflects the fields multigenerational char-acter, situating foundational scholars of early republic social historyalongside the mid-career standard-bearers of cultural history, intellectualhistory, and political economy. An explicit homage to Siegfried Gie-dions Mechanization Takes Command and with gestures toward KarlPolanyis The Great Transformation, the book considers the long nine-teenth century, attentive to the massive disjunctures of the Civil Warand Reconstruction but not bound by them or indeed, by any othermajor milestones in American political history. These essays are consis-tent with a number of general trends in the field: resistance to a fixeddefinition of capitalism, relative indifference to the worlds that werelost perspectives of an earlier transition literature, attentiveness toslavery, ambitious blending of methods and subfields, and a preoccupa-tion with unmasking the hidden operations of commodification andfinancialization. The editors position the volume as a collective attemptto bring the economy back into American social and cultural history(7), but the books greater effect is showcasing the value of social andcultural history for understanding the economic past, especially inarguing that there was nothing natural, preordained, or predictable(7) about capitalisms American incarnation. By title, Capitalism TakesCommand indicates that something specific happened over the course ofthe nineteenth century, elegantly formulated as capitals transformationinto an ism (1). The logic and law of business spilled over from therealm of economic exchange to organize society and its politics, everydaypractices, and culturally dominant understandings of self. To explainhow, the editors suggest a new set of questions to guide historicalinquiry: not Who built America? but rather Who sold America?or perhaps more to the point, Who financed those sales? (12). Thesubsequent essays show the fruitfulness of such an approach, but alsoexpose the vulnerabilities of a volume lacking any contribution investedin that once-classic hallmark of the history of capitalism: proletarianiza-tion.

To be sure, steering clear of factory-based wage labor can also be seenas one of the books most productive gambits. An earlier scholarshiphad timed capitalisms arrival to the moment when industry supplantedagriculture as the centerpiece of the economy. Capitalism presumptivelycame late to the United States as frontier farms lured would-be yeomanfamilies westward; the land served as an impediment to, if not a bulwark

PAGE 453................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:53 PS


against, capitalism. The essays in Capitalism Take Command argue oth-erwise, making western landsso readily rendered into securitiescapitalisms strength rather than its weakness. This is a move associatedwith the New Western History of the 1980s and 1990s, an influence onthe history of capitalism too rarely acknowledged. Christopher Clarkmakes the expropriation of Indian lands foundational to American capi-talism, as conquered territories became private property that sustained acredit economy in purchase mortgages for farms and advances on thecrops that would soon follow. Clark does not use the fashionable settlercolonialism to collapse imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacyinto one totalizing force of dispossession; instead he considers an Ameri-can version of primitive accumulation (36) in which common whitefamilies gained access to private property at the expense of Native peoplebut soon found that land ownership left them more, not less, vulnerableto market forces they could not control. Indeed, these settler familiesorganized politically against the more visible beneficiaries of their toil:eastern financiers, commodity speculators, and railroad barons. Clarkfinds multiple nineteenth-century capitalisms, including an admittedlyambivalent agrarian one that continued to rely upon family labor andlocal networks of exchange. He conveys his own ambivalence aboutplacing farming families under the rubric of capitalism, even as heforegrounds the agricultural sector as the driver of nineteenth-centuryeconomic development.

American farms did not merely produce unrivaled amounts of grainand cotton: They also generated a host of securities that launched theAmerican financial services industry. Elizabeth Blackmar begins thisstory with the commonplace observation that when someone died,property changed hands (93). The patriarchal system of inheritancethat had long disciplined sons during a mans life and sustained hiswidow upon his death gave way to a new kind of estate administration,one relying on the intermediation of large corporations to provision sur-vivors and future generations with revenue from pooled investments.Probate courts encouraged estate executors to liquidate real and chattelproperty and to invest the resulting funds; put differently, sell the farm,park the money in a trust company, and then collect ones patrimony ina regularized share of the trusts returns from loaning money at interestto scores of other families trying to buy a farm. Enterprises like NewYork Life Insurance and Trust Company (chartered 1830) endeavoredto protect and grow family wealth, but controversies arose over their turn

PAGE 454................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:54 PS


away from mortgages toward more speculative investments like railroadstocks: Was this a dereliction of fiduciary responsibility? Or was thegreater dereliction in failing to seize upon lucrative investment op-portunities? Although courts and legislatures in the 1850s and 1860ssteered investment back toward land, new real-estate trusts funneled fam-ily wealth into late-nineteenth-century urban development. Downtownoffice buildings and other commercial properties now generated a streamof rents for the beneficiaries of the deceased, but also for the trustsown directors, managers, and in some cases, shareholders. Longstandingpractices designed to protect widows and orphans ultimately blurredfamily property and corporate property (117), as patriarchal securityand investment securities became irrevocably intertwined.

Jonathan Levy adds a further wrinkle to this story of financial system-ization, namely the life insurance policies that purported to protect thelanded independence of farming families. To establish a farm on theGreat Plains in the 1870s and 1880s required substantial capital, and sosettlers took loans to meet the high start-up costs. But because a mort-gaged farm was not a secure asset to bequeath to ones wife and children,many men availed themselves of life insurance to provide for dependentsin the case of death or injury. This was more than a hedge, but areconceptualization of value in the era of liberal self-ownership: a mort-gaged farmers human capital was his most valuable asset (5354), notthe land on which he practiced subsistence agriculture. A man mighthave difficulty owning a farm, but he owned his own life and could sellit as risk to an insurance firm. Heres where it gets interesting: Wheredid those insurance companies park all the premiums that flowed east-ward from western farmers? In debenture bonds that clustered westernfarm 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 anewly abstract power (41). The New England Mortgage Security Com-pany and other firms responsible for these new financial instrumentsheld western farmers to a rigid payment schedule, one that generatedsubstantial stress for working families and a resigned sense that farmingwas no different from any other business in its urgent focus on generatingincome to meet bills. Levy does not glorify the independence of theantebellum yeomanry, but over the subsequent decades [l]anded wealth

PAGE 455................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:54 PS


became a dematerialized abstraction and western farmers became cogswithin an increasingly complex financial system (41).

Convoluted networks of finance had a longer history in the slavehold-ing South. In 1828, Baring Brothers began marketing the bonds of astate-chartered Louisiana bank to European investors. Thanks to favor-able legislation, the banks bonds were guaranteed by Louisianas tax-payers. Using the money it raised abroad through these bond sales, theLouisiana bank made loans to local slaveholders, who used the veryslaves they were purchasing with the loans as collateral. In this way,Louisianas slaves, coerced into producing cotton under a regime ofintensifying violence and readily converted into cash on the auctionblock, sustained a trans-Atlantic chain of credit. This process wasrepeated numerous times in neighboring states and involved a numberof prominent European banking houses. Foreign capitalnot to mention,foreign demand for cottonhelped launch an economic boom, but atimmeasurable human costs to enslaved men and women, who endured asecond middle passage to the southwestern frontier, then an intensifiedlabor regime in the cotton fields, and finally the forced sales accompany-ing the bust that arrived in 1837. The financialization of American slav-ery, argues Edward E. Baptist, . . . turned people into numbers, thevalues of their bodies and labor into paper, chopped them, recombinedthem by legislative fiat, carried them in suitcases across the ocean, andsold them to people on other continentssome of whom undoubtedlybelieved that they believed in emancipation (9091). In an essay explic-itly engaging the 2008 financial crisis, Baptist recreates an earliermoment when the collusion of state and financial elites (7273) low-ered regulatory checks on the securities market and normalized rampantspeculation. Baptist places slavery at the center of the Panic of 1837, andreminds readers that the fictions of finance had real consequences ofunimaginable horror in the lives of American slaves. Connecting thesocial history of the plantation to trans-Atlantic high finance, Baptistspolemical and unsparing essay is the must-read of the volume.

The volumes other essay on slavery is Amy Dru Stanleys explorationof slave breeding and free love, two slurs in antebellum politicalspeech that posited North and South as fundamentally different even asthe national economy of cotton bound them closer together. Sectionalpartisans used these loaded terms to articulate the boundaries of the

PAGE 456................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:54 PS


market, resisting its intrusion on sacred intimate relations. Forced repro-duction was a recurring theme in abolitionist exposes of slaverys immo-rality, contributing to emerging northern understandings of freedom aspredicated on individual choice and self-ownership. Love featuredprominently in this discourse, especially once slaveholders seized on itto construct their discourse of paternalism and an accompanying critiqueof northern society as unnatural in its privileging of consent over obliga-tion. On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, therefore, love became apotent 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 ownnotions of freedom around love and the ability to choose marriage part-ners for themselves. Although the essay disavows the empirical questionof slave breeding as a plantation practice, it conclusively invests slave-holders in slaves reproduction. Especially in disputes over inheritance,contract, and debt, masters and would-be masters told of aspiring togrow slaves, not just crops (137), so long as the word breeding wasnever uttered aloud. Such disassociation did crucial work in creatingwhat might be called the Souths capitalist culture. Abolitionists fixationon breeding set the terms of the Norths engagement with the market,making it possible to define freedom as a matter of the heart and notmerely the pocketbook. Yet this too was self-delusion, as northernerslacked the capacity to see their commercial economy (especially theirtextile mills) as remotely connected to the Souths growing population ofslaves.

The cultural history of capitalism revels in such ironies, with TamaraPlakins Thorntons essay on the aesthetics of commercial infrastructurea case in point. Thornton follows American tourists to the docks ofLondon and Liverpool where they encountered massive warehousingcomplexes of such scale that only the language of the sublime coulddescribe them. This was a peculiar aesthetic response, for the sublimebelonged to the natural world and conveyed a kind of pleasurable terrorappropriate to witnessing an erupting volcano from a safe distance. Buta shipping depot? As spectacles of rationalized economic activity(172), the British docks exuded a transcendent power to summon andorganize the wealth of the world on a scale beyond the comprehensionof any single individual. The docks stood as an aesthetic marker of

PAGE 457................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:55 PS


emerging capitalist values: security, regularity, precision, impersonality(196), and the kinds of Americans who might travel there and recordtheir observations were precisely those who might find pleasure in theview. In other words, Thornton locates one of capitalisms legitimatingdiscourses, wherein [s]ailors, laborers, pilferers, and smugglers, stormsand tides, conflict and riskall fade before the sublime vision of a perfectmechanism (198). These erasures situate capitalism outside the realmof politics, using the association with natures vast power to suggest thatresistance is futile. Although Thornton does not pursue the contempo-rary analogy, her essay could very well be about twenty-first-centurycontainer ships: massive, seemingly unmanned, storing vast outpouringsof human labor in bland steel boxes, organizing global supply chainswith a relentless efficiency, and also strangely beautiful.16

If capitalism found legitimacy in a visual aesthetic, those critiquing ittook inspiration from a literary one: melodrama. Jeffrey Sklansky, whorecently published one of the fields most useful historiographical essaysin Modern Intellectual History, here reconstructs the political world ofWilliam Leggett, the 1830s New York City democrat and fierce opponentof state-chartered banks. Before becoming an editor and essayist, Leggetthad begun his career as an actor, which provided him a repertoire ofsettings, characters, plots, themes, and standards that enabled him tofind transcendent significance in the politics of corporations and cur-rency (201). Melodrama rose to popularity by virtue of its moral cer-tainties, and from a young age Leggett saw the world in clear terms ofright versus wrong, good versus evil. Entering journalism in 1829, Leg-gett became a spokesman for New Yorks workingmen and received (butdeclined) the Locofoco nomination for mayor in 1836. The transforma-tion of the urban economy proved incredibly disruptive for the citysartisans, but what alarmed Leggett was not the wage system, but ratherthe rise of paper money and the marble-columned banks from whenceit flowed (200). For Leggett, market relations could serve as a force of

16. The Forgotten Space, directed by Allan Sekula and Noel 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 Foodon Your Plate (New York, 2013). The parallels between nineteenth-century globalcommerce and the current Wal-Mart economy are explored in Nelson Lich-tenstein, The Return of Merchant Capitalism, International Labor andWorking-Class History 81 (Spring 2012), 827.

PAGE 458................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:56 PS


liberation, unless corrupted by private corporations wielding state char-ters and issuing currency that lacked a basis in reality. Melodramas pref-erence for transparency lent itself perfectly to attacking paper money asa kind of misrepresentation, while also dividing the world into honestlaborers and the corrupt bankers who sought to defraud them. Leggettand other 1830s commentators situated the money question in popu-lar politics, not some esoteric realm of financial expertise. Even beforethe dire conditions of the Panic of 1837, men like Leggett attributedeconomic instability to political misrule, thereby summoning a reassuringbelief that proper representation could reconcile older republican prin-ciples with new market practices, agrarian democracy with industrialcapitalism (220). Melodrama may have relied on stark dichotomies, butSklansky reminds historians that Jacksonian-era political thought couldnot be reduced to simple pro-market and anti-market positions.17

The prototypical figure of capitalisms ambiguous reception was theurban clerk, a striver with questionable prospects who Michael Zakimcalls a model citizen of market society (224). In a captivating essay,Zakim places the clerk at the center of an organizational revolution predi-cated on paperwork. Capitalisms paper technologies of invoices, inven-tories, and permits turned the office into arguably the most importantproduction site in the industrializing economy (229), for it was here (ina Foucaultian turn) that clerks invented the the market through theirmeans of administering it. Zakim is particularly interested in the pro-duction of capitalist knowledge and the material forms of its organiza-tion and dissemination, topics that have brought the history of capitalisminto conversation with new scholarship in history of the book and sci-ence studies. A host of commercial colleges had emerged by the 1860sto teach young men to handle a ledger, and this capitalist pedagogymade penmanship into both an industrial technology and a highlymobile form of property readily purchased on the open market at com-petitive prices (242). A quick and clear hand was touted as a clerksbest prospect for upward mobility, but in the end, the clerk would neverbe more than a hand, a replaceable worker mass producing for an econ-omy dependent on an exploding amount of information (247). Still, hisparticular form of work was indispensible not merely to the rise of thebureaucratic office associated with Max Webers capitalist modernity nor

17. See note 1, above.

PAGE 459................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:56 PS


to our present-day fascination with the knowledge economy, but to aredefinition of industry to mean the making of profits rather than themaking of things (224). For Zakim, capitalism did not cause, but wasthe product of a massive epistemological shift, albeit one relying lessupon treatises of political economy and more upon the 1840s equivalentof Excel for Dummies.18

The administrative restructuring of firms into multidivisional units toseize upon the proliferation of commercial information characterizedGilded Age capitalism, but as Sean Patrick Adams argues, the transfor-mational moment was a generation earlier during the Civil War era.Northern states issued corporate charters at an unprecedented pace dur-ing the war, and while general incorporation laws had become commonover the previous decades, new provisions allowed firms greater auton-omy to raise capital and particularly to operate in other states. For exam-ple, Massachusetts chartered seventy mining corporations in 1863 and1864 to seek coal, copper, and gold in faraway Pennsylvania, Michigan,and California. States offered corporations greater leeway in the name ofwartime exigencies, but soon came to depend on corporate taxes to meetwartime expenses. New taxes on corporate income (and not merely fixedproperty) comprised a growing percentage of state revenue, thus tyingthe fiscal health of states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to the well-being of their corporations. No firms were more important to this politi-cal economy than the railroads, which prospered during the war under

18. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the EnglishEast India Company (Chicago, 2007); Adrian Johns, Ink, in Materials andExpertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. UrsulaKlein and E. C. Spary (Chicago, 2009), 10124; Jacob Soll, From Note-Takingto Data Banks: Personal and Institutional Information Management in Early Mod-ern Europe, Intellectual History Review 20, no. 3 (2010), 35575; Josh Lauer,From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of FinancialIdentity in Nineteenth-Century America, Technology & Culture 49 (Apr. 2008),30124; John J. McCusker, The Demise of Distance: The Business Press andthe Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,American Historical Review 110 (Apr. 2005), 295321; Ben Kafka, Paperwork:The State of the Discipline, Book History 12 (2009), 34053; Kafka, The Demonof Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York, 2012); Markus Krajew-ski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 15481929 (Cambridge, MA,2011); Christoph Hoffman and Barbara Wittman, Introduction: Knowledge in

PAGE 460................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:57 PS


the combined support of government contracts and reduced regulation.The triumph of corporate interests was, in Adamss estimation, a domi-nation born of wartime circumstances (276). This future was auguredin West Virginia, a compelling place to see wartime policymakers create abusiness-friendly regime from scratch. In its concessions to corporations,West Virginias constitutional framers typified the broader northerntendency to construct an institutional framework that would attractinvestment from across the nation, maintain strong ties with importantrailroads, and abdicate significant regulatory prerogative in the interestsof keeping their states capital friendly (274). The Civil War was hardlybad for business (as economic historians had once argued), but effectedan emancipation of an altogether different kind in the Northern states(251).

There is one outlier in Capitalism Takes Command, an essay thatunderscores the different sensibilities of traditional economic historians.Robert E. Wright gives the corporation an earlier prominence in Ameri-can capitalism by tracing the growing sums of money that antebellumfirms raised through the sale of securities. Here, high levels of investmentmake sense because corporations make sense: They allow for economiesof scale, vertical integration, research and development, reduced produc-tion costs; and they channel capital to where it could do the most good.Many Americans, explains Wright, . . . realized that corporationswere engines of economic growth and an arena where the upstart UnitedStates led the world (162). True, the 1830s witnessed the vilification ofthe corporation in political discourse, but if enough people had trulythought corporations evil, the quantity of money invested in them wouldhave gone down rather than up. Wright fashions an early republic own-ership society in which American clamored for more corporations inorder to create more investment opportunities. Ownership wasunequalthe rich could of course afford to own more shares and biggerpolicies than the poor couldbut it was open to all on equal terms(161). Like the present-day high school janitor who ranks among theinvestor class by virtue of his municipal pension, the early republicdomestic servant whose employer deposited her weekly wages in a

the Making: Drawing and Writing as Research Techniques, Science in Context26 (June 2013), 20313.

PAGE 461................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:58 PS


mutual savings bank (lest she spend them inappropriately) could alreadytake pleasure in her indirect corporate stock and bond ownership(161).19

The only losers that Wright can identify in this new world of financeare investors themselves, who sometimes saw potential income from theirinvestments sapped by agency costs associated with inefficient corpo-rate governance. Wright has no use for the cultural work necessary tocreate a popular culture of investment, taking it instead as a human pro-clivity simply awaiting an available outlet. Panics and corporate mal-feasance have no part in the story, for if widows losing their life savingsat the hands of corrupt bank directors mattered in some larger way, thenaggregate rates of investment would have fallenand again, they didnt.Unique among contributors to the volume, Wright seeks neither to de-naturalize capitalism, nor to unmask its relations of power.20

So indifferent is Wright to capitalisms human costs as documentedover generations of social history that the reader becomes nostalgic forsocial historys master narrative of struggle and resistance. And thatswhen the reader confronts the relative absence of privation in the volumeas a whole. Except for the collateralized slaves of Baptists essay, capital-ism seems to generate anxiety but not real hardship, a sense of resigna-tion but not a politics of outrage. This is a capitalism born without blood

19. For a comparable example of the gulf between traditional economic historyand the considerations of power and culture that characterize the history of capi-talism, see Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, Commerce by a Frozen Sea: NativeAmericans and the European Fur Trade (Philadelphia, 2010).

20. On the obstacles to making investment culturally legitimate and politicallyviable, see Alex Preda, The Rise of the Popular Investor: Financial Knowledgeand Investing in England and France, 18401880, Sociological Quarterly 42(Spring 2001), 20532; Bryna Goodman, Things Unheard of East or West:Colonialism, Nationalism, and Cultural Contamination in Early ChineseExchanges, in TwentiethCentury Colonialism and China: Localities, the Every-day and the World, ed. Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman (New York,2012), 5777; Peter Knight, Reading the Ticker Tape in the Late Nineteenth-Century American Market, Journal of Cultural Economy 6 (2013), 4562; JuliaC. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors Democracy(Cambridge MA, 2011); Robert E. Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: PoliticalUpheaval in Antebellum Maryland (Urbana, IL, 2009); Courtney Fullilove, ThePrice of Bread: The New York City Flour Riot and the Paradox of Capitalist FoodSystems, Radical History Review 118 (Winter 2014), 1541.

PAGE 462................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:58 PS


dripping from its gaping maw, a capitalism that floats above the messi-ness of class conflict. In a thoughtful afterword, Jean-Christophe Agnewidentifies the tradeoffs involved in building capitalisms history on theordinary material practices that habituated Americans to the new sys-temic rules of capitalism as a market forms of life, and that did so in wayof which most Americans at the time were only dimly and bemusedlyaware (279). The sense of contingency at the heart of the history ofcapitalism project can disappear from view if capitalism is effectively anon-event. And without state violence, the anomie of factory labor, andthe hunger pains of grinding poverty, a capitalism built upon the imper-ceptible processes of commodification and financialization is a capitalismthat appears the product of inexorable and irresistible forces; in otherwords, it becomes re-mystified, not de-mystified.21

One remedy, as Agnew notes, would be to introduce more individualcapitalists into the story, specific actors to combat the anonymity thatprevails in the volume. Recent work in the field has brought an anthro-pological eye to nineteenth-century elites, situating their financial strate-gies in a range of domestic arrangements, intellectual engagements, andcultural blindspots. Works like Richard Whites Railroaded: The Trans-continentals and the Making of America are hardly flattering portraits ofcapitalist heroes, but even the most prudent men of finance like Nathan-iel Bowditch and Lewis Tappan led lives reflecting the central conflictsof nineteenth-century America. Early republic scholars might be sur-prised to learn that Cornelius Vanderbilts career was far more interestingin the first half of the nineteenth century than in the era of the RobberBarons; born in 1794, the young Vanderbilt was the foremost pilot inthe tri-state area during the War of 1812 and by the 1840s had builtwhat still functions as the Northeast Corridors transportation network.John Jacob Astor and the fur trade have received more popular thanscholarly attention, but following eastern capital westward to places likeAstoria would have the further advantage of engaging Native Americansas participants in the history of capitalism.22

21. These criticisms are also articulated in Carico and Orenstein, Fictions ofFinance.

22. Barbara M. Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., The Limits of HomoEconomicus: An Appraisal of Early American Entrepreneurship, Journal of theEarly Republic 24 (Summer 2004), 20818; Andrew M. Schocket, Thinkingabout Elites in the Early Republic, Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Winter2005), 54755; Thornton, A Great Machine or a Beast of Prey ; Lauer,

PAGE 463................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:58 PS


Another remedy, of course, is to pay more attention to labor, whetherin its workbench materiality, its trans-Pacific organization (an importanttopic in the global history of unfree labor), or its unwaged performancein the service of social reproduction. The concept of the Industrial Revo-lution has largely disappeared from the history of capitalism, but thereremains much to discover by grounding a history of innovation in shop-floor discoveries and contests over work processes and intellectualproperty. As the history of energy regimes is now attracting scholarlyattention, historians might focus on the labor relations structuring theextraction of petroleum, whale oil, camphene, coal, and guano. Thequestion of what capitalism did for (or, to) women is a longstandingsubject of inquiry, but scholars continue to find new insights from wom-ens participation in the formal and informal sectors of the urban econ-omy. Indeed, working peoples strategies in the informal sector mayreveal a competing history of finance and speculation. Because the earlyrepublic labor market was so functionally dependent on categories ofsocial difference, work provides the clearest vantage on capitalismsinvestments in patriarchy and white supremacy.23

From Rumor to Written Record; T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Lifeof Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York, 2009); James R. Fichter, So Great a Proffit:How the East Indies Trade Transformed AngloAmerican Capitalism (Cambridge,MA, 2010); Rachel Tamar Van, Free Trade and Family Values: Kinship Networksand the Culture of Early American Capitalism, PhD diss., Columbia University,2011; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Mod-ern America (New York, 2011); Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: TheEpic History of the Fur Trade in America (New York, 2010); David Igler, TheGreat 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 ONeill, and Paul C. Rosier, Interwoven Eco-nomic Histories: American Indians in a Capitalist America, Journal of AmericanHistory 98 (Dec. 2011), 698722. See also Nancy Shoemaker, Mr. Tashtego:Native American Whalemen in Antebellum New England, Journal of the EarlyRepublic 33 (Spring 2013), 10932.

23. On workbench mentality, see David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: TheMaterial Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010); Jeff Horn, Leonard N.Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith, eds., Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolu-tion (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 1718; Fisk, Working Knowledge. On energyregimes and extraction, see Edward Melillo, The First Green Revolution: DebtPeonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 18401930, AmericanHistorical Review 117 (Oct. 2012), 102860; Christopher F. Jones, Routes of

PAGE 464................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:59 PS


Going forward, early republic scholars might find a productive con-versation at the intersection of the history of capitalism and the history ofscience. Already, there is a developing scholarship on the role of organicchemistry in commercial farming, the rise of scientific consulting, therelationship of materials engineering to building standards, and the legalprotection of intellectual property, to name only a few promising avenuesin recent research. The history of capitalism should find inspiration here,both as history of science expands to subsume all forms of knowledgeproduction (including that about the economy) and as the history ofcapitalism continues to recognize processes like commodification as epis-temological. At a moment when more things are for sale than everbeforethe right to pollute or bandwidth or biocapital, for exam-pleit seems urgent to develop a longer history of how technologies,discoveries, and the natural world enter the marketplace. The earlyrepublics ranks of entrepreneurial tinkers, its enthusiasm for usefulknowledge, and its technological utopianism may provide an instructiveorigins story for our contemporary cultures valorization of the so-calledSTEM 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 ofLight, 17501900, PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014. On Asian labor innineteenth-century industries, see Dael A. Norwood, Trading in Liberty: ThePolitics of the American China Trade, c.17841862, PhD diss., Princeton Uni-versity, 2012; Manu Mathew Vimalassery, Skew Tracks: Racial Capitalism andthe Transcontinental Railroad, PhD diss., New York University, 2011. On infor-mal economies, see Gloria L. Main, Women on the Edge: Life at Street Levelin the Early Republic, Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Fall 2012), 33147(introduction to a special issue featuring five articles on women, poverty, andinformal economies); Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America fromIndependence through the Great Depression (Chicago, 2009); Joshua Greenberg,Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in NewYork, 18001840 (New York, 2008); Ellen Hartigan-OConnor, The Ties ThatBuy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2009).

24. Emily Pawley, Accounting with the Fields: Chemistry and Value in Nutri-ment in American Agricultural Improvement, 18351860, Science as Culture 19(Dec. 2010), 46182; Paul Lucier, The Professional and the Scientist in Nine-teenthCentury America, Isis 100 (Dec. 2009), 699732; Ann Johnson, Mate-rial Experiments: Environment and Engineering Institutions in the Early AmericanRepublic, Osiris 24 (2009), 5374; Dan Bouk, The Science of Difference:

PAGE 465................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:26:59 PS


The history of capitalism is unquestionably expansive, and it is diffi-cult to say what exactly it excludes. As a Russianist colleague quippedupon reading a job advertisement for a historian of American capitalism,This is a tautology, tantamount to a search for an historian of Sovietsocialism! The history of capitalism need not structure a new synthesisfor the entirety of the American past, nor should scholars in other sub-fields fear its imperial reach. Early republic specialists can remain confi-dent in that eras importance to capitalisms history, even as the newerscholarship suggests that the chronological frame needs to extend earlierthan the American Revolution and beyond the Civil War. As a provoca-tion to come at familiar and seemingly timeless phenomena with fresheyes, the history of capitalism will not reduce every historical query to asingle one-word answer. Capitalism will not suffice as an explanationfor the Lowell mill girls, speculation in ginseng, savings accounts, orUnitarianism, but any of these things may help explain capitalism. Andthats the point: Capitalism is proving productive to think with; perhapsit need not do more. If nothing else, it provides historians the opportu-nity to reclaim the economic past, a huge swatch of human experiencefar too important to leave to the economists.

Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry,18301930, Enterprise & Society 12 (Dec. 2011), 71731; Alain Pottage, LawMachines: Scale Models, Forensic Materiality and the Making of Modern PatentLaw, Social Studies of Science 41 (Oct. 2011), 62143; Kara W. Swanson,Authoring an Invention: Patent Production in the Nineteenth-Century UnitedStates in Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production inLegal and Cultural Perspective, ed. Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Wood-mansee (Chicago, 2011), 4154; Daniel J. Kelves, New Blood, New Fruits: Pro-tections for Breeders and Originators, 17891930, in ibid., 25367; RebeccaJ. H. Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the BritishEmpire, 18001900, PhD diss., MIT, 2013; Courtney Fullilove, The Archiveof Useful Knowledge, PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009; Rood, PlantationTechnocrats; David Roth Singerman, Fraud, Suspicion, and Control in theNineteenth-Century Atlantic Sugar Trade (paper presented at Beyond Sweetness:New Histories of Sugar in the Atlantic World conference, John Carter BrownLibrary, Providence, RI, Oct. 25, 2013); Jamie L. Pietruska, Propheteering: ACultural History of Prediction in the Gilded Age, PhD diss., MIT, 2009; LukasBenjamin Rieppel, Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science, PhD diss., Har-vard University, 2012.

PAGE 466................. 18599$ $CH5 07-22-14 10:27:00 PS

seth rockman - what makes the history of capitalism newsworthy

Documents