Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century AmericaBrian P. Luskey, Wendy A. Woloson While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners, pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as it made them. |
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Contents
1 | |
10 | |
Cultural and Commercial Geographies of Secondhand in the Antebellum City | 31 |
Making Sense of Unregulated Paper Money | 53 |
Jewish Secondhand Clothing Dealers in England and America | 76 |
The Immigrant Exploitation Business in Antebellum New York | 93 |
Fraud and Capitalism in NineteenthCentury America | 109 |
Commerce Character and Complicity in the Illegal Slave Trade | 127 |
The Changing Business of Prostitution in NineteenthCentury Baltimore | 168 |
Chapter 10 Economies of Print in the NineteenthCentury City | 190 |
An African American Pioneer in the Old Newspaper and Information Management Business | 215 |
Conclusion | 233 |
Notes | 237 |
List of Contributors | 303 |
307 | |
Acknowledgments | 315 |