The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has come to symbolize capitalism for two centuries and more. But an understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history?
American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Making Markets
- 1. The Capitalist Constitution, by Woody Holton
- 2. What Was the Great Bull Market? Value, Valuation, and Financial History, by Julia Ott
- 3. The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Idea of the State, by Kim Phillips-Fein
- Part II. Claiming and Contesting Capitalism
- 4. Utopian Capitalism, by Richard White
- 5. The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference: Human Rights in America, by Amy Dru Stanley
- 6. Negro Cloth: Mastering the Market for Slave Clothing in Antebellum America, by Seth Rockman
- 7. Revulsions of Capital: Slavery and Political Economy in the Epoch of the Turner Rebellion, Virginia,
1829–1832, by Christopher Tomlins
- Part III. “Knowing” Capital
- 8. Risk, Uncertainty, and Data: Managing Risk in Twentieth-Century America, by Mary Poovey
- 9. Representations of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, by Peter Knight
- 10. Value of Life: Insurance, Slavery, and Expertise, by Michael Ralph
- Part IV. Refiguring Space from the Local to the Global
- 11. War by Other Means: Mercantilism and Free Trade in the Age of the American Revolution, by Eliga H. Gould
- 12. “Innovative Solutions to Modern Agriculture”: Capitalist Farming, Global Competition, and the Devolution of the U.S. Rice Industry, by Peter A. Coclanis
- 13. Importing the World’s Fair, by Michael Zakim
- 14. Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism, by Kris Manjapra
- Selected Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
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