Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century AmericaMichael Zakim, Gary J. Kornblith Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 13 | |
The Fate of Landed Independence in NineteenthCentury America | 39 |
3 Toxic Debt Liar Loans Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings and the Panic of 1837 | 69 |
From Family Security to Corporate Accumulation | 93 |
An Antebellum Argument over Slavery Capitalism and Personhood | 119 |
6 Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporation Nation | 145 |
Americans Look at the London and Liverpool Docks | 169 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abolitionism abolitionists aesthetic agrarian agricultural American American Civil War antebellum antislavery Austin Corbin banks Bieller bonds Boston Cambridge capital capitalist Charles charters Chicago Civil claimed clerk coal commercial commodities companies corporations cotton courts debt early economic England enslaved entries dated exchange farm mortgage farmers firms free love Henry historians History Homestead incorporation industrial institutions investment investors Jacksonian John Journal land legislatures Liverpool London Docks Louisiana manufacturing Massachusetts masters merchants million Monopoly mortgage nineteenth century North Carolina Oxford University Press panic Papers partible inheritance Pennsylvania percent Philadelphia planters political production profits railroads real estate Revolution rural securitization Siegfried Giedion slave breeding slavery social Society South Southern Sublime tion trade trusts United Virginia wage labor wartime wealth West India Docks western farm William Comstock William Leggett wrote York