Review: Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories

Reviewed by John N. Blanton

I’m a fan of improv comedy. I have a long commute, so I fill a lot of drive time with improv podcasts. They can be silly, and they don’t always work, but there’s an ethos to improv comedy — or improvisational music for that matter — that I really admire: “yes, and.” The idea is that you accept and build upon the ideas of the people you’re improvising with, that creativity is iterative and collaborative. And I’ve noticed a similar ethos at play in much of the recent scholarship brought together under the rubric of the New History of Capitalism (NHC). American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, encapsulates the diverse, expansive historical work that has come to define the NHC in the decade since it first burst onto the historiographical scene in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. In their brisk introduction to the volume, Beckert and Desan sketch the intellectual genealogies of NHC scholarship and lay out its program in broad strokes, necessary given the wide variety of scholarship brought together in American Capitalism. Like the seminar sessions at Harvard’s Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism from which they grew, the essays proceed in “an open mode” without “[endeavoring] to create a unified definition or a singular history.” But as Beckert and Desan point out, this diversity is the NHC’s greatest strength — the “contest over definitions” is generative. Still, a number of important motifs do recur through these scholarly “yes, ands” — the constructed-ness of markets, the struggles capitalism generates, the ways capital shapes what is knowable, and the global reach of capital.

American Capitalism: New Histories
Edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan
Columbia University Press, 2018
448 pages

Part I of American Capitalism, “Making Markets,” examines the political, social, and cultural construction of capitalist markets in the United States. Woody Holton’s essay on “The Capitalist Constitution” counters lingering Beardian interpretations of the federal charter, in which the Constitution was designed to protect the economic interests of a landed rentier class, and instead positions the founders as would-be entrepreneurs who hoped guarantees for the sanctity of contract and limitations on the states’ ability to grant debt relief would “make America safe for capitalist investment.” Julia Ott’s fascinating application of valuation studies methods to the “great bear market” of the 1920s demonstrates how investment firms constructed demand by pitching stock ownership as a route to personal independence and social harmony in a democratic polity. These booster campaigns intersected with “various… conflicting models” for assessing value employed by individuals, firms, and the state to create a broad market for corporate stock. Kim Phillips-Fein argues that New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis was a result of a longer struggle over financing for municipal services. Public funding through taxation was supplanted by debt financing as capital fled Gotham, and calls for “fiscal responsibility” and the slashing of municipal services could be heard well before the city revealed its insolvency. The austerity that followed the crisis, then, had been under construction for some time and represented both a tightening of municipal purse-strings and a limiting of the “mood and imagination” of city politics. Taken together, these essays emphasize the NHC argument that markets are socially constructed — legally through the Constitution; ideologically through appeals to patriotism and manly independence in brokerage advertisements; politically in the struggle over bond issues and municipal services in New York City.

From the construction of capitalist markets, American Capitalism turns to the struggles they generated in Part II, “Claiming and Contesting Capitalism.” Richard White’s call, in “Utopian Capitalism,” for increased attention to “the markers of the struggle between different forms, imagined or real, of capitalism” is a powerful reminder of the dialectical tensions within capitalism itself — and that workers could contest capitalism by claiming (and reframing) it. In White’s rendering, late-19th century Americans, from corporate managers like Charles Francis Adams to labor activists in the railroad workers’ brotherhoods, sought to construct competing economic utopias within capitalism, though ultimately the corporate utopia of the railroad magnates won out. In “The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference,” Amy Dru Stanley expands on her earlier work on gender and emancipation to argue that legal protections for women’s bodily integrity came, not through the Reconstruction amendments, but from the Commerce Clause, raising provocative questions about the relationships between persons, commodities, and state power. Seth Rockman’s essay demonstrates how the “lives and livelihoods of free and slave [were] intertwined within American capitalism” through an analysis of the “Negro Cloth” industry in Rhode Island. The essay follows Isaac and Rowland Hazard, brothers and textile magnates, as they battled against the political odds to gain entrée to the lucrative plantation market during the Nullification Crisis, worked to develop products that would meet the specific needs of slaveholders — and, Rockman notes, enslaved people themselves, who could be canny consumers — and retooled their New England operation to this specifically Southern market. An essay from Christopher Tomlins on Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the subsequent Virginia debate over gradual emancipation, entitled “Revulsions of Capital,” rounds out the section. Tomlins productively toys with the multiple meanings of his title throughout the piece, demonstrating how “slaveholders’ revulsion at their own human capital for its rebelliousness,” which in the short-term created political space for debates over gradual emancipation, ultimately became a “revulsion in political economy’s classic sense—a redistribution of capital” through the burgeoning domestic slave trade. Where Part I of American Capital demonstrates that capitalist economies must be constructed, Part II shows that their meaning and operation in any given historical context remained (and remain) contested.

American Capitalism’s third section, “Knowing Capital,” turns to the construction of capitalist epistemologies, ways of knowing that were inseparable from the demands of (in this case primarily financial) capital. Mary Poovey’s examination of the concept of risk in the early 20th century demonstrates how methods of data collection promoted by corporations and the state underpinned discourses of acceptable risk in capital investment and the compensation broker “experts” should receive. Ignoring economist Frank Knight’s distinction between risk and uncertainty, Poovey argues, led many Americans to believe that mountains of statistics and sophisticated theoretical models could tame, if not eliminate, the risks of investment. Peter Knight illustrates how Gilded Age and Progressive-era visualizations of markets — from political cartoons to the now-ubiquitous Babsonchart — served as crucial sites in the contest over corporate finance capitalism, used both to critique the corruption of the market and to rationalize its fluctuations. Michael Ralph’s outstanding essay on slave life insurance policies grapples with the conflicting ways slaveholders, insurance firms, and enslaved people valued Black life, and the different ways each sought to insulate themselves from risk while benefitting from the capitalization of enslaved bodies. While other scholars have noted the significance of slave life policies to southern enslavers and northern insurance firms, Ralph’s insight into the ways enslaved and free Black people themselves leveraged the commodification of their lives to free relatives or keep their households afloat is a stark reminder that American capitalism was profoundly shaped by the dialectical tensions of the master/slave relation. These essays, like the NHC emphasis on knowledge production more generally, remind us that what we “know” about capitalism is often itself a product of capitalist ideology — it is by stepping outside the epistemes of capital, they collectively argue, that we can better understand how they came to dominate our worldview.

The volume’s final section, “Refiguring Space from the Local to the Global,” situates American capitalism in broader transnational contexts. Eliga Gould troubles common assumptions about American revolutionaries’ devotion to free trade, demonstrating that liberal policies existed alongside “neomercantilist” programs like those of the British Empire. Indeed, Gould argues, free trade and mercantilism were “complementary parts of a complex and interconnected whole” where protectionism created the conditions for liberalization. In a fascinating exercise in reverse-chronological narrative, Peter Coclanis examines the US rice industry by working backward from 21st century disputes over genetically modified rice, to the mechanization of rice production in turn-of-the-20th century Louisiana, to “bioprospecting” and the development of distinctive slave labor regimes in the 18th century Carolina Low Country. Throughout, Coclanis highlights common themes (the capital-intensive nature of rice culture, the tenuous place of American producers on the world market) and the “innovative solutions” rice planters pursued to address these challenges (from slave labor to GMOs) to show how “the character and trajectory of the rice industry… were related to the character and trajectory of capitalism during its various phases.” Michael Zakim’s essay, “Importing the Crystal Palace,” explains why New York City’s 1854 international exhibition, modeled on the wildly successful Crystal Palace exhibition held three years earlier in London, failed. Zakim uses the comparison to good effect, demonstrating what made American industry distinctive in the period (American goods were cheaper and more functional) and illustrating how corruption and profit-seeking resulted in a lackluster exhibition that even P. T. Barnum couldn’t save. Kris Manjapra’s excellent essay closes the volume by following the migration of the plantation complex across the global south in the wake of New World abolition, demonstrating that the coercive labor regimes associated with West Indian slavery actually expanded under the liberal regimes that dismantled chattel slavery. These essays together remind us that, while capitalism certainly took on distinctive forms in the United States, it was always a transnational phenomenon — developments in London, West Africa, and Bengal were inextricably linked to American capitalism.

The role of New York City in the history of American capitalism receives extended discussion in a number of essays, pointing toward exciting new research possibilities for Gotham scholars. Given the importance of finance capitalism to the volume, scholars interested in Wall Street will find much of interest in American Capitalism. Julia Ott’s discussion of the masculinized appeal of stock market investment demonstrates the benefits of viewing finance through a gendered lens and, along with Kim Phillips-Fein’s discussion of the fiscal crisis, illustrates how a variety of claims from the public sphere impinged on the world of capital. Surely New York City, as the home of American finance and site of a particularly robust public sphere, calls out for further such studies. Michael Ralph’s essay on slave life insurance and Seth Rockman’s piece on plantation textile production support the broader NHC argument that forward and backward linkages tied industrial and finance capital inextricably to American slavery. Many of these linkages were forged on the stock market floor, and scholars of New York City history would do well to examine how they influenced other arenas of life in Gotham as well. Kris Manjapra’s argument about the global migration of the plantation complex reminds us that the afterlives of slavery continue to inform flows of global capital and bound labor down to the present, processes with which New York bankers and brokers were (and are) intimately familiar. Michael Zakim’s discussion of the failed Crystal Palace exhibition also frames Gotham as a site of economic, political, and intellectual exchange and, together with Manjapra’s essay, points outward to the place of New York in global networks of capital and information, areas where scholars might push research further.

Taken together, these essays illustrate many of the important interventions made by NHC scholars over the last decade. The political — in all its complicated manifestations — has definitively returned to the study of political economy. Not only has the kind of scholarship on display in American Capitalism brought the state back in, it has also expanded our definitions of politics (and economy) by illustrating how capitalist structures and institutions are bound up with the lived experiences of flesh and blood human beings. Race and gender, once peripheral to the historical study of capital, are now central to the way historians understand capitalism. The imprint of the recent explosion of interest in the relationship between slavery and capitalism is clear throughout the volume — five of the sixteen essays deal explicitly with the question, and slavery plays a significant role in three more. The greatest strength of American Capitalism is that, while its authors share a number of animating concerns and questions, they are not bound by any definitional or programmatic restrictions and so approach the history of capitalism from distinct angles. The result is a kaleidoscopic array of interpretations, linked by their shared concerns yet still in (productive) tension with one another. In all of these ways, American Capitalism is an exemplar of the kind of “yes, and” approach emblematic of the NHC more broadly.

For all of its capaciousness, however, the NHC might benefit from a few more “yes, ands.” First, the authors and editors of American Capitalism might have “yes, and-ed” each other more directly. The essays in the volume do not explicitly reference or engage one another — odd given their genesis in the seminar room — and the (laudable) diversity of topics and approaches can, at times, obscure important commonalities and points of divergence. A conclusion from the editors might have drawn out some of these themes more directly or gestured toward areas for further inquiry. Another missed “yes, and” is methodological. The noted (and admitted) reluctance of some NHC scholars to put their work in conversation with that of economic historians has become a regular (if, in this reviewer’s opinion, overblown) point of criticism. Still, I think engaging economists and economic historians more forthrightly can only help the field (if only to more sharply hone its critique), and there are plenty of “traditional” economic histories — Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson’s Unequal Gains, for example, or Gavin Wright’s recent articles on slavery and capitalism — that have important things to say to the NHC scholarship.[1] There are also older historiographies that this volume might have “yes, and”-ed more effectively — I’m thinking specifically of the mid-20th century British Marxist debates around the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe, but also American scholarship on the late-18th and early-19th century “transition to capitalism” (by which the authors almost invariably meant industrialization) produced in the 1970s-‘90s.[2] These “old histories” of capitalism, while they certainly have their limitations, had the virtue of connecting “modern” industrial capitalism to its “early modern” agrarian capitalist antecedents. And particularly in the United States, which remained an overwhelmingly agrarian republic for much of its history, these connections seem worth tracing — indeed, they may prove indispensable to a more complete understanding of the ways race and gender are articulated with American capitalism. (Or maybe I’m just a cranky early modernist miffed at the lack of attention to the period I study. Yes, and?)

As a representation of current NHC scholarship, then, American Capitalism shows us the benefits of a broad approach to the study of capitalism, and scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will learn much from its essays. One can only hope that this tendency toward historiographical and methodological openness will further broaden the geographic, chronological, experiential, and analytical boundaries of our histories of capitalism. Let a thousand interpretive flowers bloom. Yes, and.

John N. Blanton is an Assistant Professor in History at The City College of New York, CUNY. He specializes in early American history, with a focus on the legal and political history of slavery and antislavery from the colonial era through the Civil War.

[1] Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Gavin Wright, “Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Revisited,” Economic History Review, vol. 73, no. 2 (May 2020): 353-383.

[2] For a recent and accessible summary of the British Marxist transition debates, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Brooklyn: Verso, 2002), 34-49. Key texts in the British Marxist debate include Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1987 [1976]) and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1985]). The American transition debate was wide-ranging and methodologically and ideologically diverse. See Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Alan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).