-
: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
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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.
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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.
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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
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442 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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,
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 443
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
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444 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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.
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 445
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
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446 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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.
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 447
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
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448 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 449
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
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450 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 451
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).
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452 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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).
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 453
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
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454 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 455
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
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456 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 457
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
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458 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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.
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 459
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.
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460 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 461
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.
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462 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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.
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 463
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,
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464 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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
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Rockman, HISTORY OF CAPITALISM 465
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:
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466 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Fall 2014)
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.
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